#all my friends dropped out of my program so all those relationships are evolving

[abstract-moth]

for once I would like to be struggling academically bc my brain actually struggles to comprehend the material and not bc I have some dumb*ss sh*t going on in my personal life

[yegarts]

“I Am YEG Arts” Series: Ian Crutchley

Potential. Some people see it in everything. If you’re Ian Crutchly, you also hear it, feel it, and can’t wait to share it—which is exactly what he does. Whether he’s composing, performing, collaborating, or teaching, his end goal is always the same: to share what you can with each other. To Crutchley, that same sentiment informs a lot of what goes on in the arts here—a community he describes as a network of deeply caring and collaborative relationships—with a future he can’t wait to see.

Composer, educator, and Artistic Director with New Music Edmonton, this week’s “I Am YEG Arts” story belongs to Ian Crutchley.

Tell us about your connection to Edmonton and what keeps you living and working here.

I moved to Edmonton in 2009, along with my spouse, flutist Chenoa Anderson. She grew up out here, so, for one of us this already was home, but now I also consider it home! Top reason to stay here: the arts scene! This is a place where folks in any experimental arts discipline can find opportunities to present their own work, and also to work with others. Somehow, when you move here, those already here just seem to find you. And underlying all this is the great support we enjoy by way of public funding.

How did you get your start as a composer/performer? Was it always Plan A?

Like many, I started by playing in elementary school band class. Some things you can only see in retrospect: looking back, I can see that right away music was at least a little bit more important to me than it was to most of my friends. And while many of them dropped music over the years of high school, I kept going and, with the encouragement of my parents, decided to go on to college and university. It was there that I first found out what a composer was and immediately decided it was the right thing for me. By a weird quirk of the curriculum in the B.Mus. prep program I was in, I was actually assigned to write a 12-tone piece in my first year, and that hooked me for good. Also, I can see now that I had a long fascination (predating band class) of finding ways to make instruments (and other things) make cool sounds, and enjoyed rock music that was basically chaotic and noisy.

Tell us a little about your role with New Music Edmonton (NME) and what makes it special to you and the city.

My official title is Artistic Director, and I am basically the one in charge of supervising what artistic content we present. While some decisions are entirely my own, we do most of our programming in a collaborative way, with team-juried open calls. We also invite individuals who are not directly involved in the organization to curate events.

What makes NME special to me is seeing how, thanks to enormous amounts of community input, it has evolved from a club for classical composers into a bona fide hub for pretty much any creative practices involving sound as a medium. What makes NME special to the city? To be honest, I think it is that we remain unique in being the only publicly funded organization whose sole purpose is to support the practices we do and to offer professional presentations of new work by local and visiting artists.

Tell us about someone whose support and advice have guided your career.

Oh wow! That’s a big question. I feel like the mentorship from which I have benefited is really an assemblage of large and small things that have come from different people over the several decades since I first started studying music. My family’s unconditional support has been vital, as have been the bits of advice and situations I have found myself in as a result of my teachers’ guidance, suggestions and interventions. I have also learned tons from my students. At the heart of it all, for decades, I have been blessed with incredible support and sage advice from Chenoa, my partner in life and art since we met at UBC.

What does community mean to you, and where do you find it?

It’s somewhat epitomized by the very young person who, accompanied by a parent, went door-to-door in our neighbourhood early in the pandemic, leaving a note letting anyone know that if they needed anything at all, they could call and this brilliant human would be there for them. Amazing, and inspirational! The words caring and sharing also come to mind, along with an obligation to act, when we can, to ensure others are okay and getting the help they need. We can’t be a community unless we care about everyone in it and share what we can with each other. I think this idea informs a lot of what goes on in the arts here—there is an amazing network of creative, collaborative, and deeply caring relationships underlying it all, within and across disciplines.

What is the creative process like for you? Where/how do you usually begin?

Like many, notebooks are the core of my work. If I am writing a new composition, it begins with trying to either verbalize in writing or represent graphically what will happen. My notebooks, worked on in cafes, libraries, airplanes, and even bars, are mostly full of multi-coloured words, numbers, and drawings. My way of working is focused on setting up a process, unique to each work, of which any finished work will merely be one example of what that process might produce.

What qualities overlap in being a composer and a performer. How have you grown most in each role?

Since my performance activities are improvisatory, constant invention is a must—yet that kind of invention is crucial to composing, too. In improv, it is the (nearly) instantaneous generation of a sound or sounds in response to a unique performance context. In composition, the invention has more to do with inventing new ways of composing via unique, stable processes that underlie a new piece.

I’m not totally sure I can say I have grown as an artist—part of being an artist, for me, is about the sense of play, even when it is serious. Maybe I am better at playing now! Hmmm… I think one way things have changed is that decisions happen more quickly, and that might be one way in which, as my “second practice,” improv has informed my compositional work. I owe a lot of that to numerous dancers in Edmonton, who have generously allowed me to grow as an improviser in the context of their workshops and finished works.

As a composer, though, I am also at a real crossroads with what I am doing—the concepts are really at odds with what I prioritized in the past. I am very happy with that and allowing myself, through slow development and experimentation, to find a way of concretizing what it is I am imagining.

What are you looking forward to most this winter in Edmonton?

I actually like the winters here and am even a winter cyclist! Personally—and I know not everyone is like this—I feel way more creative in the colder months. That has always been the case. I was also really excited to make a return to teaching this fall, at Concordia University of Edmonton. I’ve been away from teaching for a few years but have really been inspired by getting back in the classroom with a great group of students!

I think one of the other reasons I enjoy the colder months is that they tend to be the time when most arts organizations launch their seasons. Whether online or in person, I’m looking forward to all sorts of great things from local and visiting artists, and to the inspiring performances and community activities that everyone’s been cooking up in the off-season.

What excites you most about the YEG arts scene right now?

The last three years have been very hard in so many ways, and everyone (not just artists) are really just coming to terms with what’s happened. On the other hand, emerging from this period has been some truly visionary presentation strategies, some serious commitment to long-term equity policies and structural change, and even some new venues. We’ve also seen some amazing new ideas and works from established artists, countered by lots of cool and innovative emerging artists.

Underlying it all, we’ve enjoyed fabulous support from our local and national funders. All of this suggests the potential for a lot of wonderful and surprising new work to happen in the months and years ahead. The tough times are not over, but artists here will keep working and finding ways to express the things everyone is experiencing and the times in which we are living, through all kinds of amazing practices. I’m looking forward to what’s to come!

Want more YEG Arts Stories? We’ll be sharing them here all year and on social media using the hashtag #IamYegArts. Follow along! Click here to learn more about Ian Crutchley and his work with New Music Edmonton.

About Ian Crutchley

Ian Crutchley was born in Toronto, grew up in Surrey, has lived in England and New Brunswick, and seems to have settled in Edmonton. His ongoing education in creativity and in life has been informed by phenomenal teachers, students, and a remarkable menagerie of wise, sharing, and loving people he has known at work and at play. A classical composer by training, his practice has broadened in recent years to include improvisation and performances with dancers and other artists. The sounds he uses can come from anything that he finds that seems useful, from traditional instruments to marbles and odd bits and bobs he has found in junk shops and alleyways. He has a particular fondness for transistor radios.

Ian is an educator, a founding member of the improvisation group damn magpies, and the Artistic Director of New Music Edmonton.

[ipuckwithhockey]

Every New Beginning- M. Raffl

a/n: I couldn’t sleep last night so here’s almost 4k words of me missing Raff already. 

summary: You and Michael had a good thing going for nearly five years but when reality sets in you both start to think that all good things must come to an end. 

warnings: Swearing

When you left your patient’s room and headed to the nurse’s station you weren’t expecting to see a six-foot redhead waiting for you. Sure, he’s visited you at work occasionally and you don’t mind that he’s here now, but those visits in the past were always planned in advanced, were usually accompanied with a quick lunch, and didn’t take place at 10pm on a Monday. 

You met Michael a few years ago when you moved to Philly to start your residency at U-Penn’s hospital. You were just out of medical school and still focused on achieving your lofty career goals and Michael was in his prime playing for the Flyers. Neither one of you had any intention of settling down or putting in the time and effort required in a serious relationship and so the two of you fell into a casual relationship that consisted mostly of late-night activities after you were both done with your shifts. 

You were only twenty-five back then, and now you were pushing thirty. Eventually that casual relationship evolved into something more, and now you weren’t just fuck buddies, you were actually the best of friends. But even though you considered each other best friends neither of you ever made any move to solidify what the relationship that had spawned from late night texts had actually become. 

Your family and friends all wondered why you hadn’t settled down and they asked why you insisted on keeping a casual hook up around for almost five years when you were getting the age when a woman should be finding a man to marry. Michael’s family and teammates all pestered him for never making it official between the two of you, and never understood why he insisted that the two of you were just friends. But that’s all you were. You were friends. Friends that liked to have sex, friends that only thought of each other when anything particularly good or bad had happened, friends who spent the little free time they had with each other. 

And maybe the reason why you hadn’t ever stopped sleeping with Michael was because a small part of you knew you had feelings for him, but maybe it was also because you work nearly 80 hours a week and don’t have the time nor the energy to date at the end of the work day. 

Maybe the reason why Michael never tried to make you his was because he knew you were too good for him, too smart, and too beautiful. Or maybe it was because he had tried dating when he was younger and every girl he met was too annoying, too fake, or too greedy. Maybe the dynamic you had together was just too easy to ever change. 

But life isn’t fair, and just like the old saying, all good things must come to an end. 

“Hey! What are you doing here? Everything alright? You look perfectly healthy and I’m a pediatrician so if you’re sick, you’re in the wrong wing of the hospital.” You joke as you walk up to him where he’s waiting at the nurse’s station and you drop off some charts before turning your full attention to the man who had been patiently waiting for you. You still had your nose in your patient’s charts when you walked up to him, and so you hadn’t noticed the tired look in his eyes, and you hadn’t seen him nervously popping his knuckles as you approached. In fact, when you’re at work, especially during a long shift, you’re usually so focused on your patients that you don’t notice much of anything else in general. Which is why you had also missed the phone call and text that Michael had sent you hours prior, and the messages your friends scattered around Philly had sent with condolences and sentiments of shock. 

Michael knows now, with your lighthearted joke, that you don’t know. That you hadn’t seen his call or his text from earlier. And when he doesn’t say anything at first and you see that serious look in his eyes your attitude changes from lighthearted to concerned, “Is everything okay?” And while Michael knows that everything is not okay, he also knows that this isn’t a medical emergency, at least not one that can be fixed. 

“Yeah, I just wanted to come by before heading out.” He says, and even though he knows you don’t know, he doesn’t have the guts to come out and say it just yet. There’s a look of confusion on your face, “I didn’t think you guys left for the west coast until next week? Or are these 24 hour shifts finally getting to me?” You try and make light of the situation even though that look concern is still spreading across Michael’s face. 

“Yeah, the guys don’t head out until next Wednesday…” He says it and he can see the wheels in your head start to turn. That’s when you remember what day it is and your heart plummets. You’ve been working third shift, and you were two hours away from finishing your current 24-hour shift. The last 22 hours have been pretty hectic, and the thought of the NHL’s trade deadline had completely slipped your mind— until now. 

“Can um- Can we walk outside real quick?” You ask and you don’t really give him time to answer, instead you just head down the hall and out the side door to a small courtyard and Michael follows behind you. When you’re both outside, you’re still processing what he said when Michael interjects, “I’m just on my way to catch my flight. I wanted to come by to see you before I left.” 

You nod your head, and you don’t know what to say so you step into him and wrap your arms around his steady body and his arms wrap around yours, “Where are you going?” You whisper against his chest, and you focus on his heartbeat thumping against your ear. 

“D.C.” He says simply. That’s not too far you think. But you also knew that this was a possibility, him getting traded, and you know that his current contract ends this summer. He could end up anywhere in the league next year. 

“I’m sorry.” He says it as his lips place a gentle kiss on the top of your head and you let out a sigh before letting your arms drop from around him as you step back. 

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for.” and you say it just as simply. 

“Then why do I feel so guilty?” And that’s what breaks your heart. You’re both standing in front of each other, and after five years you know each other well enough to know that this thing between the two of you is more than just another friendship. And while you both hate yourselves for never making this what it could have been, you also know that it wouldn’t change what’s happening now. You were still working toward your goals and so was he, nothing about that has changed. There’s nothing to say in that moment, nothing either of you could say to make it feel like you haven’t wasted the last five years, and so Michael places his hands on either side of your face before bringing your lips to his. 

It’s a gentle kiss, and as your lips move slowly against his you know that this moment is full of words that neither one of you can speak. When Michael finally pulls away from you he sees the tears running down your face, and you try to to look away even though his hands are keep you steady in front of him. His thumbs gently run across your cheeks and you let your eyes close as he wipes away the tears you selfishly let fall. You know that this has to be harder for him. He’s leaving his life in Philly behind, his teammates, his best friends, and you. 

You bring your hands up to gently remove his from where they still rest on either side of your face, “You’re going to miss your flight.” 

He nods reluctantly in agreement, and he places on more kiss on your forehead before he turns to leave. Michael never was one for many words, and he doesn’t have to say it, you’re sure you know how he feels and you know he’ll miss you just like he knows you feel the same way for him. 

*

Two Years Later (July) 

You finally feel like you’ve settled into your new place, even though it’s been almost six months since you moved. Moving back home to Seattle was an easy decision, especially when one of the country’s best Pediatric Nephrology programs calls and offers you an attending position. 

You set out at an early age to be a doctor. In high school you decided you wanted to be a surgeon. In college you decided you wanted to go into pediatrics. In medical school you decided you wanted to study kidneys. Everything you wanted for your career had happened and now you’re a nephrology specialist and surgical attending at Seattle Children’s Hospital. 

You should be ecstatic. You should be over the moon that everything you thought you could ever want had happened. You should feel grateful that you get to live in the city you grew up in and that you can spend as much time with your family as you’d like. You should be happy, but you aren’t. 

After Michael was traded to the Capitals you stayed in touch, calling and texting when you could. You spent the night together when they played the Flyers for the last time that season, but when summer rolled around, and he signed a two-year contract with them you knew you couldn’t keep holding on to something that would never work. When you called to congratulate him on his contract, he could sense that something was off, he could hear in your voice that you weren’t yourself, and when he asked you couldn’t lie. 

You told him you thought that whatever was going on between the two of you needed to end. You embellished with some lies, telling him that you needed to be focusing on your work and that you were getting too old to have a fuck-buddy, especially when he was living 150 miles away, and when he started to protest you were quick to shut him down. You told him that you both knew that it couldn’t last forever and that it was okay because all good things must end, and as much as you tried to convince yourself that what you were saying was true, you knew that you didn’t believe any of it. You knew that you loved him and that you wouldn’t find another man that knew you the way he did. But you also knew that your worlds were only growing further and further apart. 

The next year or so was hard. You stopped returning Michael’s calls and you distanced yourself from anyone who was associated with hockey. You threw yourself into your work and your patients and before you knew it a year had passed. As much as you knew that you were only barely keeping your head above water, you also had no idea how to fix whatever mess you had made for yourself. You were thirty-one years old, married to your job, and single. Oh, and still in love with a guy you knew you couldn’t have. 

You weren’t sure what to do or if there was anything you could do, but when Seattle Children’s called and made you an offer you took it as a sign. Your parents were thrilled that you were moving home, and you thought that this was a change that you needed. Something to break up the monotony. Something to shake up your life and to help you get back on track. The excitement you had mustered up for your new position was met with an amazing medical program, but you still had that same empty feeling you had when you were back in Philadelphia. So, you did what you did best, and you continued to work your ass off. Morning, noon, and night you were working with patients and roaming the halls of the hospital, but when your shift inevitably ends you find yourself backing your apartment… alone. 

You’ve never been one for TV and now that you try to avoid hockey all together, you don’t usually watch any at all, but tonight you just felt an itch to reach for the remote that rests on your coffee table. You turn on some random sportscast in the background while you scroll through emails on your phone, and you almost miss it but your well-trained ears pick up on the familiar name. 

“Michael Raffl signing a one-year contract with the Seattle Kraken is probably the most surprising thing to come from this off season so far!” The moderator on the TV says and you have to shake your head as if to wake yourself from what feels like a dream. Your hand instinctively reaches for the remote to turn up the volume and you continue to listen to what the talking heads have to say. 

“You know, everyone thought he’d be retiring this year, he’s 34 and has a nice chunk of change in his bank account, I’m surprised he isn’t heading back to Austria.” 

“I think this could actually be a good signing for them. They need some veteran presence on their young team and Raffl brings experience and a solid presence on the third or fourth lines. He could really bring something different to their game.”

“They’re getting him for cheap too! It’s seems to me like he’s interested in the team or just wants to keep playing if he’s taking this kind of deal.”

You can’t believe what they’re saying. Michael signed a one-year contract in Seattle. And while you don’t keep up with hockey anymore, you remember from all the conversations you’ve had with him, he had already been thinking about retiring in a few years back when he was traded to the Capitals. Why would he sign a mediocre contract with a team on the other side of the country for one year? But you don’t let yourself go where your heart wants to take you. You’re sure he doesn’t even know that you’ve moved from Philadelphia and even if he did, you’re sure he wouldn’t have signed with a team just because you were going to be in the same city. 

It’s been two years. It’s in the past. 

*

Six Months Later (December 31st) 

You’re not sure what you’re doing here. You’re in dress that’s probably too short and too tight, and your feet are killing you. But you let your co-worker, Jen, drag you out for New Year’s Eve. She’s a twenty-seven-year-old Nurse from your department and while she’s sweet and fun, she’s also almost five years younger than you and her stamina for nights out is a lot better than yours. You spend most your time at the hospital and when you’re not there you’re with your family or opting for a nice dinner or quiet bar instead of crowded clubs and house parties. 

You’re sure that most of the people in this club are closer to Jen’s age than to yours, but you put a smile on your face anyway and try to have fun. Jen’s fiancé has been stuck to her side all night, and even though some of your single co-workers are out with you too, you still feel a bit out of place. After the fourth twenty-something guy approaches you, drunk, and with a not-so-charming pickup line, you’re ready to head for home. It’s just about 11:45, and you think that if you can get an Uber you can be home before the ball drops. 

You’re just about to make your move toward the doors when you feel a hand snake around your waist. The uninvited hand only adds to your desire to leave, but when you hear a familiar voice in your ear you stop dead in your tracks. The hand is still touching you and his body is now close against your back when you hear him say your name for the first time in years. 

You turn quickly and you swear you’re hallucinating but when your feet trip from your swift movement and he quickly steadies you with his arms, you know he’s really there. 

“Michael… Wh-What are you doing here?”  Nothing feels like the right thing to say. Michael isn’t sure what words to use either, even though he’s replayed this moment in his head a million times by now. He’s practically run through every possible scenario of running in to you. If it was in the grocery, surely it would happen in the frozen section. It would probably be around 1am and you’d both be there to grab a pint of ice cream. If it was at a coffee shop, you’d be ordering your usual latte with almond milk and he would be ordering his black coffee to-go. He even imagined it happening at one of his games. But when some of the young single guys finally got him to agree to come out tonight, he hadn’t thought about the possibility he would find you in a club in downtown Seattle on New Year’s Eve. 

“I live here.” He says it matter-of-factly over the loud music blaring around you and your first instinct is to say, “I know.” 

He knows that coming out here was a risk and he knows that it’s been two years and he knows that you’ve probably moved on, but hearing you say that you knew he had been here all this time and hadn’t reached out made his heart hurt with a pang of disappointment. And for a minute you’re just standing there with people rushing around you, and you’re not sure what you’re supposed to do. You’re not sure what this “moment” is for or why now of all times the two of you are faced with each other again after all these years. 

You decide you don’t have anything to say, and you just shake your head, “I can’t do this.” You say it quietly but bluntly before moving from his grasp and weaving through the crowd of people on your way to the door. When you make it outside you don’t realize that he’s followed you and when you reach the sidewalk you hear him call your name as he comes up behind you. 

“Wait. Please.” He begs as he reaches for your arm.  

“What?! What do you want from me?” You ask as your turn to face him, and it’s more of plead because you realize now, in the cool winter air that your chest hurts from heartbreak that’s two years old, and your mind is racing with what he could possibly say to make up for the seven years of avoiding those feelings. You’ve thought about what you would say to him if you ever saw him again, but now all those rehearsed lines have vanished and for some reason you’re angry. Angry with him. Angry with yourself. Angry that you’ve wasted over half of a decade loving him. 

He lets go of your hand and he anxiously runs his hands through his hair, and now, thankfully all those scenarios he’s run through his head are coming to true, “I just want you to know that I loved you.” He says but all you hear is past tense. “I loved you from the first night I met you. God. You were so smart I had no clue what you were talking about, but I knew I wanted to listen. I loved you for five fucking years and never had the balls to tell you.”

“And then reality set in and I got traded and you shut me out- And I don’t blame you for that either.” He interrupts himself. “I don’t blame you for getting tired of waiting or for knowing that you deserved more, and I thought that you were right, all good things have to end. And I really thought that I would get over it and that maybe I’d find someone who was half as good as you who would make me happy enough, but I never did.” His eyes are bright and searching yours for some indication that you’re hearing what he’s saying, but your facial expression hasn’t changed, and you stand there staring back at him blankly. “I never stopped loving you. And I know that it’s selfish but when I heard you moved and Seattle offered me a contract, I had to take it. If not for the opportunity to keep playing, then for a chance to at least tell you how I’ve always felt about you. How I feel about you now.”  

He’s still trying to figure out if you’ve heard anything he’s said but when you let a little laugh and shake your head in disbelief, he knows he’s too late. So he presses his lips together tightly, and lets his head fall in defeat as he starts to turn away from you. 

You’re so taken aback by everything he’s said. It’s like you knew everything he just told you all along, but hearing him say it aloud, hearing him mirror exactly how you’ve felt for the last seven years, you know that this is one of those moments that life gives you that you can’t pass up. And just as your mind is catching up, Michael is moving to turn away from you, but before he can turn his back your hand is gripping his shirt and pulling him into you. 

When your lips collide the weight that has rested on your shoulders for the last two years is finally lifted and your bodies sink into each other the way water fills an empty glass. You’re consumed in each other as your mouths reacquaint each other and your tongues dance together like they did so many years ago just as you hear the city around you counting down, “5…4…3…2…1… HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!” 

And when you pull apart from each other, his arms still holding your waist and your hands still in his hair, you take a moment to take each other in. He’s older now and the features of his face are deeper, but his eyes still make you feel warm and safe and happy. He swears you look the same as the last day he saw you in Philly, and the warmth of your soft skin against his hands and the way you still have that same sheepish look after he kisses you, makes him feel like that twenty-five-year-old kid he was all those years ago.  And yet, after all this time, now you finally know that every ending is just a new beginning. 

[besybil]

A LESSON ON SERVITORS

chaoscommentary

Introduction

In the Chaos Magick ladder which I briefly described in a previous article we have Servitors as the next evolution of our high magick.

Just to remind you we go from:

Sigils -> Servitors -> Egregores -> God forms.

Servitors are much more difficult to put into application than sigils. They require more time and energy as well.

The good news (for some) is that Servitors can still be created in private.

Egregores and Godforms are almost impossible to create without some sort of extra participation or fellowship with other people (however I have some clever methods to use which will be described when I get to those subjects.) Regardless, before I jump into how to create a servitor, I need to clearly define WHAT a servitor IS.

What is a Servitor?

As servitor is a thought form of your own creation. One of the most popular occurrences (back in the day) was the creation of imaginary friends by children.

The power and purpose of your servitor will be entirely dependent on you and your desire to develop it. For young children, to have a non judgmental companion to walk beside them as they learn to socially cope with other people is a common mission for some servitors. Another way to think of Servitors is as “Familiars.”

Now this comes with a bit of a warning, without proper attention your servitor may gain independence and a life of its own (Thus evolving into an Egregore.) I am all about responsibility and making your magick do exactly what it was intended to do, so I will give you some tips on how to keep a leash on your familiar.

Why would I want a Servitor?

Like I said in a previous article, sigils are typically where the buck stops for most Chaotes. They are powerful, work as intended and are very accurate. You could technically stop right there and have everything you will ever need for working with magick. However, magick is more of a walk for some and an exploration of endless possibilities for others. Servitor creation is the next step into some deep waters and a step out into the wild frontier of Magick. This is where the pedal hits the metal; this is where the wild adventure begins. For many adult occultists, this is also a return to childhood which can be a very scary place for some.

That being said; familiars and their purpose are left to your imagination. A companion (friend), a bodyguard, and yes even lovers are all applications for Servitor work. However let me come with a warning, the more you feed a servitor the stronger and more independent it can become. As such I advise highly against creating servitors for sexual gratification. You may end up giving birth to a hag or a succubus (a result of uncontrolled mutation), which in the end will make your life miserable. It would be better to create a wing(wo)man to help bolster your confidence to gain a physical mate. My point ultimately is, just like sigils, there is no limit on what a servitor can do, look like or become. The only limit is your imagination. If a sigils is a magickal computer program, Servitors are magickal robots, just shy of becoming Magickal AI.

Servitors are astral constructs.  Servitors can cause physical change.

Practical use for servitors include:

An assistant in solo magickal work.

A protector for your house.

An assistant for keeping your workspace clean.

To name just a few.

Okay I get it! How do I MAKE one?

First rule: Temper your enthusiasm with caution. Respect the ritual you are about to perform.

Second Rule: We do not create accidents; make sure you truly want to create a servitor. These are not toys, they are very real beings created from your energies, they are in short, your children. Be a responsible parent.

Third Rule: Always, always, always, set up rules and restrictions to keep your servitors exactly that. Without rules, a servitor has the potential to become an Egregore and no longer under your control.

Optional but highly recommended: When I create servitors I get into the habit of breaking down ones I no longer use and incorporate them into the newer, upgraded models. I had a bad experience with leaving “junk servitors” unattended only to have them haunting my dreams and bumping into me in the middle of the night. If you are down with a servitor, release the energy and let it be free. This act prevents the buildup of malice and negative energies from neglected thought forms. Keep your workspace clean, in the astral and in the physical.

Now that we have that established let me begin.

As always with Chaos Magick, there is no right or wrong way to do this. What I offer you is what has worked for me. Tweak it for your purposes. (For me) It always helps to have a template to start with, but YOUR magickal walk is exactly that, yours not mine; you are the final Judge on what you are willing and able to commit to such a practice.

Step 1: State the purpose of your Servitor

Create a sigil or series of sigils which will define the purpose of your servitor. “Protect my home,” “Keep my house clean,” so on and so forth. Make as many sigils as you need. This is the easy part, feel free to find my article on sigil making in this blog.

Step 2: Create a body for your Servitor

You have two options here.

Option A:

You can bind them to a fetish like is a doll, figurine or even a drawing of your own design. I am a naturally arts and crafts kind of person so this is my preferred method.

Option B:

However if for whatever reason I don’t not have the time or money to create a physical representation of my servitor, I use meditation and create the servitor in my mind and in astral space.

Regardless, the process requires the same amount of energy, effort and IMAGINATION. You must visualize the servitor. How tall is it? Does it have limbs? Can it speak? It can take hours to create a body for your  servitor, but you need to define as many of its functions and characteristics as possible. Its body needs to be a vivid as possible. Some of my servitors have looked like Lovecraftian horrors, while one of my longtime companions is a very cute four foot tall blonde elf girl who speaks in wind chimes.

Step 3: Bind your sigils in the body of the servitor, and put in its safety protocols.

Binding your sigils can be as simple as drawing them inside your picture, carving them into your doll, or imagining the sigils being put in place of where its “heart” or “battery” may be. The point is to make sure your sigils are part of your servitor. Once this occurs, and you are convinced the two have become one, a safety should be put into place. As I said before, without a leash or restrain, your servitor has cart-blanche to run amok and out of your control. You have again, to options here: A command word or a counter sigil. The command word can be: “Stop!” “Sit!” “Go away!” It is best to keep it simple; although I know a few people who used poetry for particularly devious machines to make sure not everyone can shut them down. That is the key to command words however, anyone can use them. A servitor must be compelled once a person speaks a word or command phrase to abide by its programming.

Safety Method A: Command Words

Creating a command word is as simple as touching your servitor (if you used a fetish, this is easier) and speaking plainly to them “When I say <x> you will do <y>” (X and Y are your phrase and its action.) Repeat this as many times as you need to remember or until you feel you servitor is ready to comply. You can put as many command words on your servitor as you want, just be careful not to use the same word to do multiple things, or that they words are counterproductive to its mission. You could confuse the crap out of it.

Safety Method B: Counter Sigils

The second method, counter sigils, are kind of a fire and forget method. It lets a servitor know where it  is or isn’t allowed to be. This requires you to name your servitor and upon naming it, creating a sigil of its name. You must decide if this sigil is a ward or a summoning upon its creation. You do not need to commit much thought to this nor does it change the method of how the sigil is created, the intent is good enough. “This sigil means you are welcome to work in this place,” or “This sigil prevents you from going into this place,” Is good enough of a declaration for this method to work. I have seen people bind servitors in boxes with this method and let them out when needed, while others have put the symbols on doors and the like to let servitors know where they should go.

Step 4: BRING YOUR CREATION TO LIFE!!!!!

The ritual can be as elaborate or mundane as you want. However I will tell you, the more elaborate the more powerful your servitor will be in the long run. I have used a simple hand flick gesture (like turning on a light) to activate some, they only lasted a few days before the broke down. My longtime companion servitor had entire weeks of music and food dedicated to her and if she didn’t have any safety protocols in place, probably would have become an Egregore by now. Still, perform a ritual that lets the servitor know it is born. Throw it a birthday party, show it around the house, get silly, get childish. There is no right or wrong way to invite this new entity into your home, just know, the more gnosis you feed it, the better.

Step 4:

Regular maintenance of your servitor is a must. Your servitor must be in your mind from time to time. If you forget about it, it loses energy and dies. While, just thinking about it is okay, offerings or rewards are much more potent. For my lesser servitors I give them a drop of life force when they have done well. For my companion, I have treated her to donuts and milk. The key is to understand the relationship between you and your servitor. Unless you set them free, they cannot live without you. If you forget them, they will die. Woe to the chaote who creates a servitor with no restrictions and then neglects them, you may create a vengeful spirit to infest your house. So reward you servitor when they have done their duties and let them know you still care about them.

Dismantling your Servitors:

I include this part because all good occultists know the value of banishment. Some servitors outlive their usefulness and thus need to be released back into the cosmos. This is not a cruel thing to do, as a matter of fact; actively releasing your unused servitors is very humane. It is cruel to leave a bound servitor unattended to die an agonizing death of forgetfulness and neglect.

Dismantling is simple. Take the abject or thought of you servitor and tell it “You are free” or “I set you free” Imagine all of the bindings and words leaving and falling apart into harmless light. If you have a fetish, set it ablaze or destroy it in some gentle way. Make sure that the object can no longer physically house the servitor. IT is a very good practice to tell it, that it has performed well and it is time for it to move on. If the servitor doesn’t seem to want to leave then you may have to perform this a few time. My companion didn’t want to leave me when I tried to banish her the first three times, she was so fiercely loyal that I gave her a second birthday and still keep her to this day.

That is servitor making in a nutshell.

I am sure many of you have questions or will want me to elaborate. So feel free to ask questions if you need help. This is a basic outline, I am vague for a reason to encourage you to go out there and find what works for you. Just be safe and Chaos Magick responsibly.

~M.A. Hargrove © 2014

[drewschermickblindone]

Drew Schermick Reviews:

Louis Gibbor & DJ JahBluez- The Supernatural Progression of the Boom Bap

  I have had the pleasure of being in the studio to witness the magic my two friends St.Louis Gibbor & DJ JahBluez can create.

After watching and listening to them do their thing, I can profess that they are indeed the real deal.  Gibbor is among not only one of Arizona's most passionate and creative MCs but a true force in all of underground West Coast hip-hop.

His lyrical style and song writing is, dare I say, avant garde in his delivery of raw and left field approach to rap.

Jah is one of the most seasoned and invested producers in all of hip-hop; his approach to beat making and song crafting is second to none.

His production keeps evolving and as I take notice of the vast list of artists he has collaborated with. His catalogue is intimidating.

When my friend asked me to have a listen and offer some critique of their new project, I was excited from the start.

So now we have for you:

The Supernatural Progression of the Boom Bap-

  Movement-

           The opening track Movement begins with some ethereal synths.

Gibbor enters the track with some smooth vocals speaking of and on the weight of the world and its effect on him and those closest to him.

The hook is Gibbor repeating "the movement" with a nice reverb/delay with Jah inserting a nice soulful sample that pairs with St. Louis's hook.

Jah's kick and snare plus hihats mingle well with his synth based melody, which complements gibbor and medusa's lyrics and vocals nicely.

Medusa, the undisputed goddess queen of underground hip-hop, is so elegant and her contribution to this track only strengthens its resolve of subject matter and musical vision.

Gibbor ends the track with some abstract poetry about WOMEN, race, melanin, sex, love, and man's conflict with female interactions.

Jah brings in an interesting distorted clapping type sample at the end that wraps up the track with some mesmerizing production.

A truly beautiful track and a perfect way to kick off the record.

 Homesick-

           Jah's whirly strings and heavy snare begin the track, with Gibbor coming to give the DJ his props before talking about going back home to his people back in Cali. Gibbor proceeds to flow faster and demonstrate his lyrical velocity by telling a road trip story which flows into the lovely chorus where he pays homage to Albert Hammond's It Never Rains...

           While Jah brings in a beautiful female vocal sample, Gibbor raises his singing range as Jah brings in some dope biggie scratches.

           818 213 indeed.

  Scorpions' Kiss-          The vinyl crackle at the beginning of this track shifts my attention from Cali to the Middle East. Jah's production here is fine art.

                       The clarinet (woodwinds), flute, and boom bap drums emulate a type of Egyptian Noir drama score where the gods Gibbor, OHM & Myka9 come with so much heat

                       I feel as if I am in the desert on a tour to solve an ancient mystery.  Gibbor and Myka's styles mesh so well and Ohm's verse at first feels out of place and replicable, but on a second listen, I feel as if his contribution balances out their more singsong approach with his AOTAesque hard raps that complement the scene and cinematic style.

           The takeaway message of this track seems to be about cherishing the moments in time that make up our narrative and legend, overcoming our fears, and enduring.

           This is like an extraordinary film in music/song form, an epic track that deserves much attention and acclaim.

 Darling Carla-

 The strings and synths make one feel as if something is lurking around the corner.

Gibbor comes in stripped down speaking poetically about a woman/wife.

Gibbor seems to get personal and to speak tragically and romantically about a magical love and time lost.  

           I can relate and sympathize with track on a personal level, as I have had similar failed relationships that I can attribute to my brokenness.

           Hurt people hurt people; this cliché explains the last verse of the track where he opens up with a vulnerability rarely seen/scene in hip-hop.

             I am captivated and deeply touched by this one.

  This That-

Jah's sped up cuts that open and come in and out of this track are dope and fun laying the foundation for this banger.

Tomeicko kicks off the first verse with some interesting cadence and delivery. Her content is a bit dry. Some battle /semi-conscious raps work for this more straightforward track.

Volume 10 second verse is what we all would expect, respect, and admire from the West Coast legend. Gibbor's final verse, in my humble opinion, eclipses the first two verses.

I am most enthralled and into the beat and production on this track. Jah creates something fresh yet oddly reminiscent of the 1990s; it works and this song acts as a nice reprieve after the serious and heartbreaking feel of Darling Carla, thus moving the album forward in a cohesive placement.

  Play times over-

Play times is a haunting tune where Gibbor explores some horrorcore and social-political type verses.  

Despite his dark delivery and subject, his vocal stylings are very polished and he is clearly preaching what he truly believes, questioning our exploitations and personal beliefs that shape our society.

He delves into some religious rhetoric and critique which may be triggering for some, or for those with open minds, a lot of content to digest and ask yourself about; your own values and idealizations come into question.

Overall, a very deep, debating, thought provoking, and brave track that is a possible nod to Revelations?

  PSA12-

 Named by JahBluez. Public Service Announcement 12. The 12 has multiple meanings to him but he is primarily speaking on the Technic 1200 turntable.

My roommates The Adepts shine on this dope cut.

Dapper Dan kicks things off rhyming about graff and the failings of society.

Midknight comes straight in after Dap with some more social commentary followed by a nice vocal sample that transitions the track to Gibbor's world, where he continues to touch on the state of the nation with a shout-out out to his higher power; his delivery here is exceptional.

OHM follows, dropping more knowledge followed by a sick turntable demonstration by Blesd1.

Ohm comes back in again giving props to the Shapeshifters and co.

Overall, it’s a decent track that keeps the album flowing, and hearing my close homies get some shine on such an exceptional record brings me a smile.

  Give it your all-

 Gibbor goes all in speaking his truth over a dope beat with a nice conga bleed into the programmed drums complimented by a slick sample give it your all.

This song is inspiring and begs the listener to give 100% to all their endeavors

 The perfect insurgents-

Another track with Dapper Dan & ohm illuminating conspiracies and finding our purpose in the madness.

The production is solid but feels less inspired than the other songs on this album.

OHM comes with more social-political hip-hop. Ohm’s delivery on this verse is ill and noteworthy.

Gibbor’s chorus is for real and epic. Dan spits some misogyny/spiritual bars, almost contracting himself, but reeling himself back with an enlightened style that is cool as ice.

Gibbor's last verse comes also with more worldview commentary but starts to feel redundant after the last two tracks.

I'm trying to find more connection to the title referencing the insurgency and becoming radicalized and forging alliances against the evils of the world, but I think I can hear it subtly in this one.

  The Fraternity-

 Jah lays down some military type production with the drumline type beat and the trumpet sample. Jah's cuts between verses are really dope and adds dimension.

Mista Crane, my friend NOK, Embrae, and Gibbor all hold their weight on this gargantuan track. Nod your head to this banger where these heavyweight MCs illuminate the hypocrisy and failed political system, the negative forces that threaten our vision and drive us as artists and men bringing the fire to this standout track.

Gibbor’s finishes off the track with one of his finest verses on the album touching on spiritual revolution and those who are asleep at the wheel.  This one bangs and commands RESPECT.

  The Ghost-

 We are now at the final closing track titled "The Ghost"

Piano and horns float as Gibbor's poetic stylings have me in a trance.

He delves into the existential, self, and ego. Then, out of nowhere, he comes in with this Myka9esque hook featuring soulful, wild, quick, and exhilarating singing that finishes off the album on a poignant note.

A gorgeous whirlwind of a song and a perfect ending with Jah bringing in the wind. I love it.

 8/10

()()()()4/5 mics

 Drew Schermick 2021

[jeongyunhoed]

Two Mutants are Better than One

Chapter: 1 / ?

Member: San - Mutant/Metahuman!San, Hitman!San Genre: Mystery / Fantasy 

T/W: Mentions of murder, possible mentions blood and gore. Possible mentions of graphic violence. Possible. Still, just keep that in mind! Content: EXTREMELY Multi-fandom, but it mostly centers on San and the main character. Replace the OC with y/n if you wish! 

A/N: I’m trying this again after not posting any of my works online for a while (out of frustration). So, here I go again. This is under my very very wide superpowers au (you can find the entire AU on my Ao3: yeojasamho). Please keep in mind that this chapter is quite lengthy because I wanted to give readers an idea of who the characters are and some events that have occurred even without going into the rest of the stories in the au. I hope you all like it! 

Summary: Mirae is forced to revisit her past when her half-brother San shows up at Bermuda Investigations. As the two of them try to establish a relationship that they never got to have, a case pushes them to work together while realizing that they have a lot more in common than they expected.

Lee Mirae was sitting in her office at her record store that she now owned with her adoptive brother Park Jihoon. It was just another day at the store, and another day in the mostly-quiet offices of Bermuda Investigations. It had been quite some time since she was last on a case, since she was last on a mission. Her colleagues and friends Jaehwan, Chanyeol, and Hyuk decided to go on a trip together with Jaehyun, Changmin, and her boyfriend Younghoon, partly a way for them to bond and take a break and act like normal guys for once. 

Normal. That word took on a different meaning around here. 

They were mutants, all of them. People that had abilities beyond what was once humanly possible. To a few people she knew, they were the next stage in an evolved humanity. To one person she remembered, they were oddities of nature that should’ve never existed. But nevertheless, they did, and they lived quietly among the rest in South Korea, trying to make a living, act like normal, upstanding citizens. 

But Bermuda Investigations also gave that word a different meaning as the cases they took as private investigators were at spy-levels, or even, dare she think it, cases only mercenaries were equipped to do. Then again, Mirae practically was one given her abilities and capabilities. She had the ability to manipulate energy, specifically turning potential energy into kinetic light energy, that often came across as explosive. Anything she touched could turn into a projectile that could cause an explosion. She also channeled this ability of hers through her card-throwing, and her staff that Junhong made for her. The amount of energy she could charge her staff with was enough to destroy a building, something that was proven during the Seoul attack. 

She also spoke several languages, after unknowingly being able to understand people in whichever country she went. This capability was part of the assassin program she went through when she was interned in the sanitarium by her parents. She was brainwashed and transformed into a killing machine by people who would later make themselves out to be her adoptive parents, cult leaders Lee Miran and Go Changseok. But after an extensive reframing by the powerful psychic Lee Sangyeon, the trigger no longer worked on her, but it left her with a strengthened psychic block, making her mind impenetrable to telepaths. 

As she was turned into an assassin, she was a master fighter, knowing all the fighting forms even as far back as the days of the Hwarang, much to her memory. Anything she touched potentially turned into a weapon, and everyone around her who knew about it were convinced that no one could surpass her. This motivated Jihoon to learn how to fight as he wasn’t a mutant, but he wanted to protect her just as much as she fiercely did for him. Should she be wounded, her healing abilities would take hold, and it was her healing abilities that made her almost immortal, aging very slowly compared to the rest of the people her actual age. 

Unusually, the Bermuda mission also showed a newfound ability within her, and it was that of taking a person’s soul and trapping them in the cards should it touch them. It manifested whenever her eyes would turn black. It also resulted in a white streak in her hair that she never bothered coloring to have covered up. 

She heard a knock on the back door that was the entrance of Bermuda Investigations. Mirae got up, closing her laptop to pass through the store and towards the offices. “It’s open, come in” She announced, closing the other door behind her. As the door opened, her expression fell, and her eyes widened at who was standing behind it. 

It was a man, his face incredibly familiar to her, with small, upturned eyes, a prominent jaw, and he had a few purple streaks in his jet black hair that was slicked back. “Mirae? Noona?” He said. She said nothing, and instead tried to study his face. “It’s me, San.” 

“San? San...Choi San?” She said, and he nodded. Mirae was still quite taken aback at the sight of him, and instead stepped aside. “...Come in.” San went inside and she closed the door behind him. “So, what are you doing here?” She asked, leaning against a desk. 

“I just came to see you, and now I finally found you, it’s been a very long time since we last saw each other-well, I was just about to stop by here to ask for help to find you” He said quietly. 

“Almost two decades later,” Mirae said. “How did you know I was here?” She asked. 

“I asked around where I was, and they said if I needed to find someone, I had to come here because the private investigators are good. I just never thought you’d be one of those investigators” San replied. 

“Judging by what looks like the end of a harpoon gun on your back, are you planning to kill me?” Mirae asked. 

He shook his head frantically. “No, no, that’s unrelated, completely unrelated, I kind of do the same thing you do now, I guess. Only I get my jobs in another way” San explained, almost a little hesitant to reveal much. 

“...You’re a hitman, aren’t you? A harpoon gun being your signature weapon, then?” Mirae asked, figuring it out. 

“Yeah, after I ran away from home when my powers first came, I wanted to find you, and I asked the sanitarium where you were and they said you were discharged, and I was looking for you in between jobs,” San said, making Mirae look even more taken aback. “Yes, I’m a mutant too. See?” 

His eyes and fingertips began to glow yellow, and he picked up the pencil from the nearby desk and threw it towards the curtain, the pencil glowing and disintegrating with a boom just before it hit. Mirae stared at him. The door leading back to the store opened and Jihoon rushed inside, looking alarmed. “What happened? Did something hit?” He asked, but stopped when he saw San. 

“Nothing happened, I just found out that my own half-brother is a mutant too and he showed me his powers,” Mirae explained quietly. “Jihoon, this is Choi San, my half-brother, we have the same father. San, this is Jihoon, my best friend and little brother” She said, introducing the two. Jihoon looked a little taken aback, and so did San. “Jihoon and I go way back, at the sanitarium, and I take care of him now” She explained. 

“Yeah, which says a lot compared to someone who is actually related to her” Jihoon glanced at him. 

“It’s not his fault, he was a kid at the time, and if I have a problem, it would be with my birth parents, not him” Mirae patted Jihoon’s shoulder. She turned back to San. “...So now that you’re a mutant too, you’ve come to find me, now what?” She said, a little unsure. “...Do we celebrate?” 

“I was thinking more of getting dinner somewhere. I know we’ve never been close and I’ve never been able to do anything for you, but seeing as we’re both on the same page in our lives, I was thinking maybe that could change now,” He replied. “Make up for the time we lost, I suppose.” 

Just when Mirae was about to speak, there was another knock on the door. “Yes?” She called out, and the door opened. She turned to Jihoon. “Go back inside, I’ll see you later” She said quietly, and the younger boy nodded, leaving the room to go back into the store. 

In came a postman, who brought in several boxes. Mirae signed for the boxes and San helped place the packages on the breakroom table. “Where are the other people you work with?” He asked curiously, looking around. 

“Oh, uh, Chanyeol, Hyuk, and Jaehwan went on this trip together. They’ll be back in a few days. Juyeon’s busy with his shifts at the restaurant, though but I’d rather not disturb him for now” Mirae replied. 

San nodded in understanding. “I see. Well, at least now that I’m here and we’ve finally met after all these years, let’s get lunch” He said. 

“Okay, where do you suggest we eat?” Mirae nodded. 

“What’s good to eat around here?” San asked. 

Mirae shrugged. “We can go to Viva Polo, Chanyeol’s mom’s Italian restaurant. It’s right next to his dad’s live cafe” She said. 

He smiled. “That sounds good. My treat.” 

~ 

They got themselves a table at Viva Polo, with Chanyeol’s parents immediately greeting them and Mirae introducing San to them. They were seated at their usual table she would be whenever the four of them gathered for an after hours dinner every week. “So, I guess there’s no other way else how to start...How did you get your powers?” Mirae asked curiously in between ordering their food. 

“My powers came in high school, or just before I got into high school. Dad always kept going on and on about how I needed to be top of the class so I can make it into med school. He wanted me to become a doctor like him, can you believe it? But when it happened, I realized I didn’t care for that anymore, so after my first year, I decided to pack my bags and run away.” 

“You really dropped out? Dad must’ve taken you to a private school anyway” She raised a brow. 

“Yeah, and I had good grades and all, but I was still trying to figure out my powers, you know?” He said with a chuckle. “I never want to go back to that time in my life when it first came.” 

The server came in moments later and brought in their food, setting it down in front of the two of them and walking off. “So, I doubt dad did not take you running away very well when it happened,” Mirae said as they tucked in. 

“Definitely, you of all people know how he can be,” San replied, twirling his pasta noodles around his fork. “But it is nice to see that you’re here, and out of that place he put you in.” 

“It’s been years since I was discharged, and a lot has happened since then, from the Seoul attack, the Utopian cult, the Bermuda mission, the Kang mob, the Sharks…” She recalled. 

Her brother’s eyes widened. “You were in all of those?” He asked. San remembered seeing the news of those events on television and even on the internet. “Really?” He asked. “That really changed everything, you know.” 

Mirae nodded. “The Utopian cult hits home most of all, I guess. When I was discharged, I was adopted by this couple, who turned out to be the leaders of that cult, and put me through the assassin program while I was in the sanitarium,” She explained. “Imagine, turning you into an assassin while under drugs, and they kept subjecting me to electroshock therapy that wiped out a lot of my memories in doing that… at one point I couldn’t remember a lot of people, except Jihoon, of course.”

San’s expression fell. “...What happened to the cult leaders?” 

“I...I killed them. It turns out that those instincts of mine came out when they used one word on me. I nearly killed my friends, you know, but eventually, after some help and two weeks of falling unconscious, that trigger was removed. But it kind of made my mind even more unreadable” She shrugged. 

He looked down at his food then up at her. “...Knowing what happened to you, makes me wish I did something to keep you from getting taken away. I’m sorry.” 

“Now you’re feeling guilty?” Mirae raised a brow at him. “What could you have done? You didn’t understand much of what was going on. If I was going to resent you for suddenly showing up, I would’ve told you to leave the moment I remembered who you are.” 

“That’s true. But even then, I wanted to see you, make up for lost time, be actual siblings than strangers to each other” San looked down at his half-finished plate. “

“I appreciate you wanting to find me, though. But I doubt both our parents would never want to know that you came to see me,” Mirae said. 

“How would you know I still contact them?” San raised a brow. 

“You’re especially close with them, the favorite boy, even with my mom” She pointed out. “You could never lie to them, I know that. At least I think I know that. I bet they even know that killing people under orders is what you do for a living.” 

“That’s what you think,” He said. “They have no idea, I haven’t spoken to them after I joined this group of people who do what I do.” 

“What do you call yourselves? I’m guessing you guys have a name.” 

“Sleepers. Corny, I know, but there’s no other way to describe putting someone to sleep...permanently,” San replied, a slight smirk crept up on his face. 

Mirae shrugged. “I guess you’ve made billions of won by now, haven’t you?” She asked. 

“Oh yeah, totally, but I’d rather keep that part on the down low. Harpoons don’t come cheap and I think I even need a permit for each one” San pointed out, lowering his voice so as not to be overheard. 

“Seeing as you’re here, I’m guessing you’re taking a break from jobs, aren’t you?” Mirae said, taking a sip of water. 

“You could call it that. Things have been quiet, a little too quiet, around here.” 

“That’s never a good thing” She shook her head. “At least in my experience, it isn’t. It just means the bad things know how to hide.” 

San stared at her. “To me, people are just becoming more aware that people like us exist. Sooner or later, more people will come for us, just as the people you dealt with did” He finished his food. 

“I know, and if it happens, I’m not sure how I’ll handle it. If my powers were taken away by the Sharks, I would’ve been dead by now, and you wouldn’t see me like this, if you got to see me anyway” She muttered. 

A silence ensued between them, and they turned to each other. “...Well, that got dark” San tried to lighten the mood, and Mirae just smiled. “Do you still have work to do?” 

“I have to stay until closing time at the store and at the office,” Mirae replied. “Are you heading back to wherever you came from?” 

“No, I figured I could stick around, and…” San looked a little hesitant to say what came after. “Well, you see, I had to move out of my apartment-” 

“You need a place to stay?” Mirae raised a brow, and he nodded. “Well, I don’t think there’s an extra unit on my floor, but I’ll have to see if there are vacancies upstairs or downstairs.” 

San looked surprised. “You own a building too?” 

“The landlord passed ownership to me. He passed away.” Mirae replied. “Heart attack.” 

“Heart attack?” 

“Yeah, just a heart attack. I didn’t kill him if that���s what you’re implying” Mirae pointed out. 

“Of course, of course, I didn’t mean to-” 

“I may have been turned into an assassin, and whatever probably happened during the time I was one, I can’t remember anymore,” Mirae cut him off. “The trigger is out of my head, San. I don’t do that, anymore at least if I did anything.” 

“I know, I know, I’m sorry if I made it seem like you did-” 

“The difference between us is that I’ve made a life for myself doing what a normal person does. You do what you do and you’re aware of what you do,” Mirae snapped. 

“I do what I do because it’s the only thing I am damn good at,” San argued back. “But please, don’t get off your high horse.” 

“You say that like you don’t know the things I had to do to atone for my mistakes when I just told you a few minutes ago what I’ve been up to,” Mirae countered. A brief silence ensued between them. “...Maybe this was a bad idea,” She looked up at the clock. “I need to go back, San.”

San stared at her, and fished out a wad of bills from the pocket of his bag to pay for the meal.

~ 

Mirae and Jihoon were in the separate office going over the money made for the day. “So, what happened with San?” Jihoon asked, watching her write down everything on a thick wad of paper. She didn’t answer. “...Did you two fight?” 

She didn’t answer again and instead kept writing. Jihoon’s brows furrowed and he covered the paper with his hand. “Well? Did you?” 

“We got snippy with each other, well, me more than him. He implied that I killed the landlord” Mirae said softly. 

“That’s impossible, the maintenance guy was the one who found him,” Jihoon recalled. “He even went up to us and we had to call the police about it.” 

“Exactly. I think he’s got this impression that I’m still what our adoptive parents turned me into, trigger or no trigger,” She said with a sigh. “But honestly even just seeing him reminds me of what my dad did, what my parents did. I can’t even remember what they look like anymore, I just remember what they did.” 

Jihoon patted her shoulder. “It’s kind of unavoidable isn’t it? No matter how much you try to convince yourself that you don’t resent him, you still kind of do because of what your father did to you” He said softly, and she nodded. “What are you going to do now that he’s suddenly back into your life?” 

“Find him a place to sleep. He moved out of his apartment” Mirae replied. 

“He can sleep on the couch” He suggested. “Or even in the breakroom or something. There’s a bathroom by the big computer upstairs anyway” Jihoon shrugged at the thought. 

“Yeah, he’ll have to stay on the couch for a while. At least until he finds a new place or something, or until we find ourselves a new place” Mirae said. She frowned. “I guess I’m going to have to do the whole making up for lost time bit with him. We’re practically strangers to each other because he was so young when I left…” 

“Well, there’s nothing much you can do. It’ll be nice to have another brother, who also fights just as well as you do...He does know how to fight, right?” Jihoon raised a brow. 

“Yeah. He’s a hitman, he’s still one” Mirae said. 

“Oh, but at least you two will be able to really bond this time. Both of you hate your father, so there’s something you can build on” Jihoon said wisely. 

She ruffled his hair. “Smart guy” She teased. Jihoon laughed. “Come on, we’ve done enough work for today and San is waiting in the other office” She said, and led the younger boy out and into the back door that led back into the offices. San was already lying down on the couch, his bags and harpoon gun already next to him. Mirae sighed, making him sit up. 

“Hey, you’ll stay with us,” Jihoon said right away. “You don’t mind sleeping on the couch, right?” 

“No, not at all, I was sleeping on a sofa bed in my apartment,” San shook his head. “There was a guy that came by and asked that you call them, it’s about a murder or something, I couldn’t understand much, he was talking fast like he was in a hurry,” He pointed to the slip of paper on Hyuk’s desk. 

Mirae reached over and looked at the paper. It had the person’s name and number. “Park Cheondung?” She read it aloud and reached over for the phone, dialing the number that was written on it. “Hello, may I speak to Park...Cheondung? This is Lee Mirae from Bermuda Investigations- Oh,” Mirae paused when she learned it was the guy. 

“I need you to come by and investigate. My father, he was found in his study...dead… come to this address” Cheondung told her. 

Mirae frantically wrote down the address on the piece of paper and her eyes widened at the location. “Yes, yes, I got it.” She repeated the address again. San and Jihoon looked puzzled until she showed them the address. They gaped at her. 

“Come quickly!” Cheondung said, and hung up. 

She put the phone down. “Whoa, high-profile case,” she said, staring at the address Cheondung gave her. “He wants me to come down there right now,” she added. 

“Then what are you waiting for? We have to go now!” Jihoon said, and Mirae and San quickly picked up their bags, hurrying out of the building as well.

“Do we have time for a stopover?” San asked as they were outside. 

“We? This is my case,” Mirae raised a brow at him.

“You’ll still need help, no matter what that is,” San pointed out. “If there’s anything I’ve learned about my stakeouts is that-” 

“I know, but as you can see, my friends aren’t here, they’re on vacation, which means I’m doing this alone” Mirae argued. 

Jihoon rolled his eyes. “Just let San go with you, you said yourself you two need to do the whole making up for lost time thing, this is where you start,” He said, giving Mirae a look. “San, just put the rest of your bags in the lobby, but bring your harpoon, you’ll probably need it,” He said, and rushed into the parking lot. 

San followed suit and Mirae sighed as she followed the two boys back, moving ahead to the parking lot where they parked the car. “A murder in a place like the one we’re going to, must be a prominent family” She read the address again and got into the driver’s seat. 

“It has to be otherwise they would’ve called the police” San suddenly spoke, having heard them as he got in the car. 

“Yeah, let’s hope this is nothing like the Kang mob, or else I’ll have to kill some people,” Mirae drove them out of the parking lot. 

“Wait, that was you too?!” San was surprised. “I mean, yeah you did say Kang mob earlier but I didn’t think it was that same mob?!” 

“Yeah” Mirae glanced at the address again. 

San looked amazed. “You’re like a superhero then” 

“Doubt it, no one knows it was us,” Mirae shook her head as she drove. “I’d rather it stay that way, for everyone’s sake like you told me earlier” She added. “Jihoon nearly died because we tried to stop them, and so did many other people we love.” 

“Hey, don’t forget how I fought a few,” Jihoon pointed out, beaming at the memory. “It’s still one of the times I’m so proud I got to fight back!” 

San chuckled as he fastened his seatbelt. “I heard they had their own private army.” 

“Yeah, and now most of that family’s in maximum security under solitary confinement” Mirae pointed out. 

“The only girl and the only other son testified against her brothers and her father. What happened to the mother?” San asked curiously. 

“She’s under witness protection, or something like it. I’m not sure, but she’s never shown her face again, hopefully,” Mirae explained. “I’d ask Jaehwan about it but he might not want to say anything, after what happened to Jinyi…” 

“I’m sure Jaehwan hyung’s okay enough to say something now, it’s been two years” Jihoon assured her leaning over to hers and San’s seats. 

“Jinyi?” San looked puzzled. 

“The daughter who testified,” Mirae pointed out, and her half-brother nodded in understanding. “Jaehwan dated her. Months later, she went missing and then she died… that’s pretty much it,” She muttered while she drove. “He came back from that worn out.” 

“She was his case. He had to find her also for her brother’s sake, but when he came back, Hyuk hyung found out and they knew something did happen to her,” Jihoon explained quietly, frowning as he recalled what happened. 

It was the night after Hyuk went on his case, and the four of them met up again at Viva Polo after being away from each other after some time. Mirae came back from her vacation with Younghoon, and Chanyeol was busy with the restaurant as they found out. They later told it to the rest. 

Kwon Hyuk was a powerful telekinetic that also had telepathic abilities. He ran his own entertainment agency, TRBL Music with his best friend Woo Jiho, and was producing for the groups they had; AB6IX and Silver. He was also Mirae’s longtime best friend as he previously worked in Mirae’s store before leaving to pursue his music. He released his albums, but decided to work behind the scenes instead. 

Park Chanyeol was a pyrokinetic, but created fire as well. He could turn himself into a fire being if he needed to, and if he was one, he could fly and was even invulnerable as any projectile thrown at him would melt from the temperatures. With his ability, he was also able to withstand extreme heat. He worked with Mirae back in their days at the Center of Paranormal Research and was one of the few who made themselves known to be alive following the Seoul attack. He helped in his family’s restaurant and live cafe as a server and occasional chef. 

Kim Jaehwan, had extremely enhanced senses. He could see and hear things far away which made him extremely good at tracking down people. He was also gifted with super strength, which made him invulnerable in hand to hand combat. He signed onto TRBL Music after his graduation, which was when he met them and helped in stopping the Utopian cult. His best friend in college, Kim Dongyoung or Doyoung, was also an artist in TRBL Music, where he returned after quitting to try and become an investigator full-time. Like Hyuk, Jaehwan was once an artist that released some albums, but chose to work behind the scenes as well. 

Mirae pulled up in front of a large, white gate that had the name of the community on it in gold letters. Whisper Heights. The guard stepped out of his post and went up to the window that rolled down. “Yes?” 

“I’m called for by,” Mirae reached for the slip of paper. “Park Cheondung, I’m Lee Mirae of Bermuda Investigations” She showed the guard her official ID. 

“One second please,” The guard took her ID and went back inside his post. A few moments later, the guard returned and gave her back the ID. “Thank you, you are expected,” They said, and pressed the button to open the gates. 

She thanked the guard and drove on. There seemed to be an eerie silence within the suburban village. All the houses were separated by huge vacant lots, and some were built on top of hills. To them, it looked like no one made under a million won a month in the district from how lavish the homes were. Even the smaller houses had luxury cars parked in front of them. Jihoon and San gaped when they saw one particular house. It was so big it was almost like a resort. “You think they’re old money or new money?” San asked. 

“Probably new money. People who come from old money live in older and probably smaller houses that aren’t in here,” Mirae replied, pulling up to a cul-de-sac road that was lined with cars from small limousines to sleek, black vehicles. They stopped at the house and got down and noticed that the small gate was open. 

“They really are expecting us” Jihoon said as they approached the gates. San slung his harpoon on his back, while Mirae’s fingers were poised over the silver object that was in her bag. 

[fogclearer]

anonymous asked: not everyone may be into canon x oc ships but i sure am, i want to hear more about your experience with kaito

— in regards to this ask / @tsuugen​ needs to see this too

oh boy anon I don’t think you realize what you’re unleashing here — nagagiri is genuinely my favorite ship I’ve ever written in my entire time as an rper. it has quite literally seven years of development behind it ; even in the times where neither sagi nor myself were actively writing our characters, we’d still talk about them from time to time. there is so much development and care put into every aspect of their relationship, from their initial meeting and on, and kaito is forever tied into my kyouko’s story. I’m serious when I say I can’t write her without his ( and, of course, sagi’s ) impact. 

— so without further ado, let’s get into their relationship. 

kyouko and kaito’s relationship began as small interactions in which they were vaguely acquainted with each other, friendly and got along, but otherwise reserved ( kaito sticking to his general gruff front and kyouko keeping her cool persona and kaito at arm’s distance ). that was, at least, until a homecoming event. you know the big dash wide events that used to happen? one of those. 

neither of them are exactly party people, so they had been sticking to the walls — kyouko was the one that had approached kaito in this case, and when they stepped outside kyouko revealed that she had stolen her father’s skeleton key to the school ( and while there are many things about the way I wrote kyouko that I no longer agree with, this is one that I stand by — kyouko’s still a teenager, and she’ll still act out like that. all in the name of harmless fun ). so they snuck into the school together, nearly got caught by security, and the rest is pretty much history. 

they were pretty much inseparable from then on. kyouko learned that kaito could be trusted in a pinch while also keeping a secret, and kaito learned that there was someone worth getting to know beyond the walls she kept up. his talents as an empath definitely helped, as there was little she could hide from him and get away with — much to her frustration. little by little, she began to open up to him, and likewise with kaito dropping his gruff exterior. 

kaito became kyouko’s best friend. and kyouko, well .... kaito fell for her. 

he’d meant to keep it a secret, just live with his feelings and stay by her side as her best friend. but as fate ( cough sagi and I wanting to give them a little push cough ) would have it, she found out. through flowers, of all things. ( yes, this is exactly where kyouko’s fascination with the language of flowers comes from ). he kept a flower book open on his lap as he fell asleep, and kyouko happened to find it open to a sketch of herself next to a yellow tulip — the representation for a hopeless love. when she asked about it, he reluctantly confessed his feelings. 

now, as I’ve mentioned many times over, kyouko was never taught how to handle her emotions. she was taught to bury them, and not let them distract her. and what’s more distracting than romance? so while flattered, she didn’t admit to a reciprocation of his feelings. 

( but oh, did it make her chest feel as though it were blooming ) 

from here, they entered an awkward space. kaito was understanding, giving her the time she needed to sort out her feelings. slowly kyouko became more affectionate, sweeter in the way she treated him as she began to realize that somewhere along the way, she’d fallen for him too. there was a point in time where they may as well have been dating, but neither of them breached the subject. not until kyouko was ready. 

she did, eventually, admit her feelings to him. which were already fairly obvious ( again, kaito was the ultimate empath. he could literally feel her emotions. but the important part was that she come to understand it in her own time ). 

from there, there’s a handful of endings we could discuss — almost none of them happy. I have no excuse, sagi and I were angst goblins and we didn’t know the meaning of a happy ending. it took seven years for us to make a happy ending, but we’ve finally done it and that’s primarily where we operate with their relationship now. it’s a post - tragedy point where kyouko has gotten her memories back thanks to the neo - world programming and they’ve both left the future foundation and get to be happy together and god they deserve it after everything we’ve put them through. 

now, the reason I think they work so well together goes back to everything I’ve already said about what kyouko needs in a partner. kaito has been nothing but understanding and patient with her when it comes to her own feelings. he’s never pressured her, but he also hasn’t let her hide and ignore her own feelings. it’s a good balance that’s definitely aided by him being an empath — like I said, there’s not a lot she can get away with hiding from him. he won’t make her talk, but he’ll know when somethings up. he’s also not afraid to call her out on her shit despite his infatuation. they’e gotten into so many arguments about her behavior and how reckless she is, but they’re arguments that needed to happen because quite honestly kyouko hadn’t been considering how her actions made kaito feel. which is important, regardless of the nature of their relationship. kaito is important to her, and she needed to realize he worried about her and therefore the things she did affected him too. 

they’re not a perfect couple by any means, but where’s the fun in writing a pairing that fits together flawlessly? what I love about them so much is at the end of the day, they make it through because they want to be with each other, and that is more important than any disagreement. they care so deeply for each other, and its been really wonderful to see that evolve throughout the years. 

.... aaaand it also helps that sagi is one of the most brilliant writers I’ve ever had the pleasure to plot with. my portrayal of kyouko has changed a lot over the years, and he’s always been right there with me. I wouldn’t be half the writer I am today if it weren’t for him. ♡

[seasaltmemories]

Devil’s Line Review/Analysis

This is gonna be a different beast to tackle for a few reasons A) I actually started this once before and dropped it, B) For a proper analysis I’m gonna have to dive into spoilers, and C) I technically haven’t finished the entire series, as the last volume of the manga isn’t translated (and I will only talk about the manga here) I say this all so you’ll be gentle with me as I pop from subject to subject

To start let’s get that summary:

Tsukasa, a college student, is rescued from an attack by a devil, one of many vampires that can blend in among the human population. Anzai, her savior, is a half-devil who exploits his supernatural gifts as a member of a shadowy police task force that specializes in devil-related crime in Tokyo. As Anzai continues to keep guard over Tsukasa, the two quickly forge a tentative bond—one that Anzai fears will test his iron-clad rule of never drinking human blood …

So I feel like expectations play a lot into how you receive this story and what you want to get out of it.  My first time going in I was told it was a dark fantasy series, and then what I got in the 7 or 8 chapters I read was a lot of faffing about of will they won’t they with the external plot only appearing to be there to drive the main couple together, so I got bored and dropped it

This time I went in not only knowing there would be a lot of romance, but also personally more in the mood for vampire stuff, and kinda meeting it where it was allowed me to see it grow into more interesting ways

The beginning isn’t bad, but I think it is best appreciated when you know up front this is 50% romance and 50% thriller, both genres are equally important to the narrative, but rather than starting out with that ratio, the beginning focuses entirely on Tsukasa’s and Anzai’s blossoming romance, from there a greater plot concerning devils begins to unfold, and then the two really begin to work in sync to prop both sides up

Bc once the ball starts rolling, the plot becomes a high-speed mystery concerning secret conspiracies and questions of who you can trust, what started out simple gets more information added on that complicates matters as you begin to question your own judgement, still what keeps the plot from becoming a jumbled mess is the fact at the heart of the story is always Tsukasa and Anzai, it gives the narrative focus that I’ve see few things series have

I should also mention my first impressions of the romance being shaken bc I am so used to series having couples who are love at first sight yet waste the entire time actually getting together until the end, and while these two basically also have love at first sight and take a while to actually get together, they get together in an overall timely manner, and their relationship is allowed to grow and evolve in very mature ways, not just sexually but also emotionally, a lot of their arc together is learning about how to communicate what they want to the other and as their relationship grows, their strength as individual characters grow as well

Now I’m gonna get into some spoilers, but what turned the series from simply fun into can’t put down is the timeskip

A lot of the elements that I enjoyed were being done before the time skip, but I feel like the skip is what allowed it to reach new heights it just kept hovering up at

Bc slowly as we start from Tsukasa and Anzai, the world expands, first to his colleagues, then to their enemies until it is a large but never burgeoning cast of connections, and the way they keep it all together is that it is grounded by lot of casual little moments to see people just be people, no matter their relation to the protagonists, we are consistently shown the humanity of almost everyone we come in contact with, and as a result it is hard to not fall in love with people who had previously tried to murder your faves (and might still currently be doing so)  and after the timeskip we just get hit with back to back side stories of the cast each going through their own internal problems, while still keeping to focus on Tsukasa and Anzai

Another thing that helps is that the worldbuilding concerning devil’s is extremely well-done, again it starts out simple “they see blood, then transform into monsters, sexual lust is connected to their bloodlust” but not only do we learn devil’s themselves, but a lot about what it means for a world to have a population like this, for example we get a detailed look into the tech created to help devil’s have safe sex with human partners and while it can be easy to poke fun at such specific details, by the end of the series it really does feel like an actual genetic disorder rather than some supernatural stuff with a sciency explanation tacked on

A moment that really made me stop and realize “oh the person behind this must know stuff besides story-telling” was when after and educational lecture about devils, the speaker admitted privately that the model used to describe them was problematic in that it demonized certain sects of devils, like wow, it was a quick moment, but a story showing the struggles of nuanced activism? Then we not only touch upon exploration of devil’s through a social science lens, but the overall philosophy that gets brought up on how to deal with institutional bigotry is interesting (this will be endgame spoilers so if you want to skip this, scroll down until you see bolded words again)

In two separate cases, we see two queer women involved in institutions get asked to do something unethical, both decide that if they refuse then they’ll get fired and someone else will simply take their place, and their goal then becomes to work through the system until they make it to the top and can start openly resisting

The effectiveness of these strategies is intriguing to dig through, the first is a researcher breeding devil/human children to study, (many of the participants being convicts) and from her actions we see her try and inform those involved to the best of her abilities and get their consent, and when possible, try to use couples who are already together, any information that would put individuals at risk of being chosen for illegal experimentation, she destroys, when she becomes the head researcher, she changes the program to rely completely on studying the children of already formed devil/human couples who come to them willingly

The second is asked to head the conspiracy of wiping out all devils, when ironically she is a devil herself, and so what they do is essentially play their part until they’ve amassed enough power to eventually stage a coup, until they can get an insider to be the prime minister to publicly reveal to the world, the conspiracy and have vocal support of devil rights, not only does this plan depend on the actual killing of innocents and riling up actual bigotry, but it also attracts actual cold-blooded killers and violent bigots which complicate matters, and for all their effort, the prime minister gets assassinated right during his big speech 

As I mentioned their is still one volume left untranslated so I don’t know how it will add on to this, (most of the plot lines got wrapped up so I can’t see many major developments happening beyond wrapping up character plot threads) but they’re some juicy thematic questions to chew on as well, which is always a treat

Returning to some general strengths of the series, there really is a genuine sex-positive stance, I say that specifically bc it isn’t just simply exploring themes of sex, but also the way it does so, as mentioned above, there is a lot of baggage around devil’s and their sexual relationships, but a lot of what the characters have to learn is that such desires are normal and not some great abomination, just something they have to be responsible about, no one is shamed for communicating what they want/like, especially women, where multiple female characters are in fact openly encouraged to communicate to their partners that they are interested in sex, and from their we watch multiple couples (including a m/m one) work out what they want, in one neither is interested in romance, but is ok with a friends with benefit thing, two have the male participant be unsure of their feelings and so they work in their comfort zone (one likes physical touch and kissing, another they only hug) the m/m couple not only get screen-time of struggling with the “are you gay, I want to show interest but not get perceived as a creep” deal, but one admits to being repulsed by sex, and they still work out a romantic relationship

And the most surprising amount part of this, is that there is no unnecessary titillation, the eternal question of what is over-sexualization and all can get confusing and tiring, so I won’t define a specific threshold here or say this is the only way to tell such stories about sex, but first you don’t got any unrealistic body proportions on anyone or any creepy shots, everyone is fully clothed and dressed normally for the non-sexy bits, and while we do get a sex scene, it is pretty non-graphic (you got boobs and that is all that it on screen) so there really isn’t any confusing moments like in other stories I’ve experienced where I have to wonder if the framing contradicts its message 

I could go on, but the strength of the story lies within at the end of the day being about normal people just trying to live their lives, it really does seem to capture the essence of what it means to be human effortlessly, and I am just immediately charmed and ready to follow Ryo Handa in whatever other projects she does

[sustainabilitysarah]

Progress in Food Production Illustration

In 1968, when I was and impressionable six years old horrified by what the television was showing about the Vietnam War, listening to the Beatles sing 'All you need is love', my parents bought a book called "The Population Bomb" by scientist Paul Ehrlich. It suggested that we were running out of resources because our population was growing too fast and we were consuming our earth's life support system faster than it could

regenerate. Two years later, on the first Earth Day, I began my activism, rounding up the neighborhood kids and staging a clean up of the polluted stream behind our apartment that ran into the Hudson River. 

A year later my Beatle idol George Harrison held a "Concert for Bangladesh" to raise awareness of the suffering there. Like many kids worried about the "starving kids in Bangladesh" I asked in school why things were getting so bad. Like most school children around the world, we were told how the population bomb supposedly worked, how it ticked. The idea went back to the Reverend Thomas Malthus who argued in 1798 that "population increases geometrically, while food supplies increase only

arithmetically". This has been the prevailing wisdom for over 2 centuries and is often illustrated by the following graph:http://www.biology.iupui.edu/biocourses/N100/images/ageomgrowth.gif

http://occ.crescentschool.org/geography/human/unitvagricultural/malthusgr aph.jpg

Looks neat, right -- so mathematically precise and inevitable. The problem is that it is wrong. I felt it as a kid. It bothered me throughout middle school and high school and on in to college. The reverend's now famous "Malthusian" predictions of doom and gloom came from a man who never studied biology... we now realize that he was a religious zealot and bigot who made up theories to try and stoke anti- immigration fever, arguing that undesirable poor people were basically breeding like rats. The problem in his logic is easy to spot when you use Nexus thinking: FOOD IS A POPULATION. Food comes from living creatures who have populations. They expand GEOMETRICALLY. If you let them. If you encourage them. It doesn't matter if we are talking about Brewer's yeast or earthworms or oak trees or apple trees or chickens or ears of corn or cattle or cocoa covered ants... whatever you eat comes from living organisms that are programmed to reproduce as fast as they can... that WANT to reproduce... geometrically. Just like us. So... population increases geometrically, whether it is us or our food. Starving kids in Bangladesh or Ethiopia simply shouldn't happen, and, I will insist to you, WOULDN'T, if we allowed the organism we eat to do their thing.

The key to keeping food production in line with food consumption, I have been arguing, is to use the "food-waste-to-fuel-and-fertilizer-and-food" or FW2F3 formula wherein every molecule of nitrogen, phosphorous, pottasium and carbon and micronutrients found in our wastes in our burgeoning cities is transformed immediately, in situ, back into food through the magical transduction of anaerobic and aerobic biodigestion and urban vertical farming and micro-livestock.

Using these simple techologies to close the loops in the food/energy/water nexus, the curves on those graphs should continue to go up in lock step, until we reach the limits set by sunlight. And then we will have to figure out safe, harmless ways to grow not just ourselves and our "economy" but our ecology, and eventually help grow new planets. But even that... the promise of space stations and terraforming planets, isn't out of the question. After all, the one thing that doesn't seem to ever be in any danger of NOT expanding... is the universe."

Today’s lecture is about “Progress in food production: a new wave of ancient practices and post-modern technologies that use less water and less energy, produce less waste and can even produce more energy.”

And I believe, to paraphrase Deuteronomy 12:3, we have to start by “tearing down the altars and smashing the sacred pillars” that were erected by wrong headed Malthusians who used a gross misunderstanding of biology and a total lack of nexus and systems thinking to scare us into what I call “induced paralysis for profit”. The idea comes from what is called in economics classes “The Scarcity Model: the fundamental economic assumption of having seemingly unlimited human needs and wants in a world of limited resources, which states that society has insufficient productive resources to fulfill all human wants and needs”. 

When the scarcity model is used to create fear, to create an atmosphere of doom and gloom, to predict the inevitable arrival of the four horsemen of the apocalypse (Conquest, War, Famine, and Death), political economists and political ecologists suggest that it is much easier for elite groups to manipulate the masses. They control the machinery of conquest and war, and they use the specter of famine to gain their power.

Food production sits at the heart of the nexus – every animal on this planet (and doubtless the vast majority of beings in our universe) finds food to be the fundamental. It is priority number one, for unless you are a being of pure light you need the food that grows with light to survive. And if you spread misinformation that famine is imminent, that starvation is just around the corner, you can mobilize armies.

However, looked at from a FEW Nexus perspective, this fear of famine we

have been living with since Biblical times (the four horsemen are part of the Book of Revelation of Jesus Christ to John of Patmos, at 6:1-8 in the New Testament written during the Roman occupation of Palestine) is a peculiar Middle Eastern and North European phenomenon it turns out, coming from civilizations in regions of the world where water stresses constrained food production. People in well-watered tropical regions rarely felt threatened by food scarcity and in fact were described by anthropologist Marshall Sahlins as living in a state of perpetual abundance. He postulated that hunter- gatherers were, in fact “the original affluent society” at a symposium entitled "Man the Hunter" in 1966 and this idea has been tested and found true for most peoples around the world where water was not a limiting factor. It explains why hunting and gathering and subsistence farming persist to this day, and why so many people resisted being brought into modern civilization or adopting modern agriculture methods. In fact the work of historian Anthropologist Eric Wolf, such as “Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century” and Yale professor James Scott in books such as “Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed” teach us that there have been enough failures due to the form of agriculture that emerged from the conquering civilizations that the conquered were willing to sacrifice their lives to revolt against them. Somehow, it seems, those certain schemes to improve yields were social and ecological disasters that should have been rejected by civilizations but instead were used to confirm the Reverend Malthus’ scientifically unfounded hypothesis – a classic but often neglected example of what is known as confirmation bias – which wiki defines as “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative

possibilities”. When it comes to food production, the alternative possibility, which is persuasively argued in Richard Manning’s book “Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization” is that monocropping annual vegetation and basing civilization on grain agriculture, on the use of plants in the family Poaceae/Graminae, that is the grasses – wheat, rice, corn, barely, oats and sugar – yes, sugar is a grass – is, to caricature the 45th president of the world’s most powerful agriculture and military empire, “ a disaster”.

History records that agriculture and famine are the Jekyll and Hyde of the long and often militarized march of civilization. The one came because of the other, says Manning. Most of us were taught the opposite weren’t we? Taught that human life, as the 17th century imperial philosopher Thomas Hobbes decried in his book Leviathan, was “nasty, brutish and short” We were told that humans lived in a state of semi-starvation UNTIL they discovered agriculture. We were told that agriculture saved our species from hunger and misery, gave us the surpluses that enabled our climb to civilization. Sounds good, turns out not to be true.

Even Harvard’s Spencer Wells, a friend of mine who is the geneticist who leads the National Geographic Genographic project writes in his book “Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization” that when humans shifted from hunting and gathering in that original affluent society to grain agriculture the average height of men dropped from about 5 foot 7 to 5 foot 2 and women’s pelvic girdles narrowed to the point where death in childbirth increased in frequency. 

These were clear signs of malnutrition recorded in the fossils. Agriculture was to blame... floodplain agriculture dependent on disturbance species that grow like weeds after a disaster because they are weeds. And they end up causing disasters thereafter because they evolved to live in disaster environments, places where floods and fires ravage the countryside on a regular basis. In effect they DEPEND on disasters for their own reproductive survival. It is as though once we hitched our caboose to the weeds and became weed eaters, we started living for them and not the other way around.

Michael Pollan talks about this in his wonderful book that reframes our relationship to addictive plants called “The Botany of Desire”. 

He points out that you could look at us as the slaves of addictive plants that evolved to control us through their effect on our brains so that we would help them reproduce. This idea, which British Scientist Richard Dawkin’s calls “The Extended Phenotype” in the battle of Selfish Genes, isn’t really new. 

In 1872, when Samuel Butler published his utopian fiction “Erewhon” the major premise of the people who fled Europe to live on the island of Erewhon in the hopes of creating a better civilization was that they would not allow themselves to submit to the control of their addictions or any system that makes us into its own slave. On the island they refuse to use technology like cars and steam engines and typewriters and telegraph or any machines. It isn’t that they don’t know about these things – in fact they have an entire museum where they keep them safely on display in glass cases. They tell visitors, “in your civilization machines don’t serve you, you serve them. You go to work in the morning and waste your days slavishly building more machines and oiling them and fixing them and keeping them running. It is like the bee that is the servant of the flower... flowers can’t move to reproduce themselves, so they addict the bee with beauty and nectar and perfumes and the busy bee spends its whole life toiling just to help make more flowers”. The phenotype of the bee is being controlled by the genes of the flower, not the bee. This is the concept of the extended phenotype, which finds its purest expression in parasitology.

So there are some who believe that the crops we turned to in our modern agricultural systems are acting more like Parasites that food stuffs, and that when we think we are serving food in the “restaurant service” sense , we literally are serving food – i.e. we now serve THEM, as servants.

This makes sense from the perspectives of evolutionary psychology and behavioral ecology.

Whether it was drought in arid desert regions or winter freezing water into ice, the limits to plant growth and reproduction, and hence to animal fecundity were set by the availability of water. In the Middle East, certainly, it was not energy that was missing from the Nexus. Sunshine has always been abundant in those latitudes to provide energy for food production.

In the European countries the harsh winters did indeed constrain plant productivity and famines could result in winter if care wasn’t taken to take the enormous fecundity of the spring, summer and fall and store the harvest surplus for the fallow period. But Hunter Gatherers North and South, in the cold regions or the hot ones, originally depended on agroforestry, on tree crops, on perennials, not annuals. And they depended on the animals that depended on forests – on forest boars and jungle fowl and woodland ungulates – all the ancestors of our modern pigs and chicken and cows. In the north the forest leaf fall in the fall built up incredible rich soils during the winter ready for an explosion of food in the spring and summer which created enough surplus for the mammals we ate to survive the winter. In the south the forests retained the water that fell sporadically and created their own microclimates through transpiration. They forests created environments so rich in the cornucopia of foodstuffs that our mythology now recalls as “The Garden of Eden”.

And if you want some mythological proof of the disaster or agriculture, just look at the curse we were to endure after eating the tree of knowledge and getting kicked out of the garden, “To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat from it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field; 19By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground”. So eating bread isn’t salvation, eating bread is the CURSE. No wonder so many hunters and gatherers said, “shoot, I’m going back into the forest, no way I’m doing hard time through painful toil to eat when I can pick fruits and vegetables and trap

animals.” And the fossil evidence of malnutrition affecting the pelvic bones of women, noted by Spencer Wells in Pandora’s Seed, is corroborated in the curse in Genesis when God says, “To the woman he said, "I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."

We can even comment on what this reveals about the emergence of patriarchal rule due to the shift to grain agriculture. My experience with hunter-gatherer populations is that the women are usually the ones who

understood the sheer abundance of biodiversity that nature offered to put into the cooking pot. I experienced it when I was living with Melayu and Dyak tribes in the rainforests of Borneo and was taken into the forest by the medicine woman who was cooking our meal and her grandson who climbed the trees to get the foods. She was called the “witch doctor” and as she laid out the huge variety of foods we collected to put in the cooking pot I had images of the witches’ cauldron with its “eyes of newt, frogs legs, bats wings” – all things that would have provided great inexpensive abundant protein but which today are shamefully associated with evil and

witchcraft. After all, women were BURNED at the stake for understanding and promoting biodiversity in diet by the European patriarchy, and children punished or mocked for thinking they could go into the forest as kids do and come back munching on lizards and grubs. Agriculture can be blamed not only for this tremendous patriarchal violence and loss of biodiversity as we simplified the landscape to a handful of weedy grasses, but for what James Scott calls the “dummification” of humanity. At one time, as I experienced among the hunters and gatherers of Borneo, harvesting food was an educational adventure that made women and children experts who rivaled the best Ph.D. botanists and naturalists who Harvard sent out. With agriculture we turned brilliant self-sufficient peasants into outdoor factory workers and, of course, quite literally when you are talking about the first 400 years of agriculture in the European colonized Americas, slaves. The violence inherent in agriculture rears its ugly head everywhere.

And it could be said that Genesis itself records the clearest indication that grain agriculture is the scourge of mankind, the source of its original sin of violence in The story of Cain and Abel. This chapter of the Bible is the clearest indictment of wheat agriculture one could imagine, and nobody seems to comment on it. Abel is a pastoralist who tends a flock of animals who wander about like ungulate hunter gatherers, eating what God has given them. His brother Cain is... a wheat farmer, somehow stupidly living out God’s curse to scratch a living in the hot sun through toil amidst the thistles and thorns that always accompany weed agriculture. Abel brings a lamb meat sacrifice to the altar of God, along with diverse fruits and vegetables he has gathered, and God is pleased.

Cain then comes with a bunch of wheat and the Bible says, “but for Cain and for his offering He had no regard. So Cain became very angry and his countenance fell. Then the LORD said to Cain, "Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen?7"If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it."...

To me this is a clear indication that the ancients saw wheat offerings as a kind of sin, the sin of an addiction, an addiction which Cain could not

master. In his anger he turns around and kills his gentle carnivorous animal slaughtering brother.

Think about it for a moment... it is enough to make Vegans go mad: The vegetarian is the killer, the slaughterer of baby goats is the gentle one.

Could it be that this ancient myths were there to warn us that wheat is a weed, that grains are drugs, that we haven’t been growing food all along, but addictive substances that will end up mastering us through the Botany of Desire?

So, to get back to Reverend Malthus, who in my opinion must not have spent an awful lot of time delving into the hermeneutic interpretation of the books he preached in his fiery diatribes against the poor and the immigrants, it is clear to me that the entire Matlhusian premise is based on a fabrication of the weed eaters, who most likely did observe that if they kept planting grains and consuming starches and sugars their own sickly but ever increasing population would outstrip the fecundity of the land and so human populations would increase geometrically while their drug-food agriculture would only increase arithmetically if at all.

But if Abel had been Abel, we might have returned to the garden a long long time ago, where food is a self-increasing population grown in permacultural symbiosis into perpetuity. The good news is, that the world as we know it IS coming to an end. And what is ending isn’t the good life, but the bad life we inherited from our dummified forebears. We can begin again. Permacultural Food Production shows us how.

[chpinthestacks]

In the Stacks with Lara Mimosa Montes: Darrel Ellis

This past March, I visited OSMOS at 50 East 1st Street in Manhattan’s East Village to see some works by the Bronx-born painter and photographer Darrel Ellis. As far as I know, the last time any of Ellis’s works have been shown in New York was over fourteen years ago, in 2005, so it’s something of a big deal to see his work in the real world once again.

When I first began looking a bit more thoughtfully into Ellis’s biography upon recalling that he had been included in the exhibition Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960’s, a basic internet search yielded very few results, especially in comparison to Ellis’s peer group, which includes artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and David Wojnarowicz. Apart from a short entry about Ellis on Visual AIDS and an exhibition catalog from 1996 published by Art in General to celebrate the posthumous, traveling exhibition which featured seventy of the artist’s works from his estate, there remains very little in print on the subject of Darrel Ellis. Given the works of his that I was able to view online and the little bits that I had been able to glean from his bio, this just didn’t sit right with me. This is an artist whose work needs to be known.

Self-portrait based on Peter Hujar photograph, c. 1990, painting on canvas, 22” × 24”. Courtesy of OSMOS. ⓒ Estate of Darrel Ellis.

Darrel Ellis was born December 5th, 1958. He died April 3rd, 1992, a couple of months before David Wojnarowicz, whose full-scale retrospective at the Whitney Museum, History Keeps Me Awake at Night, I saw last fall. Having encountered Wojnarowicz’s presence as a teenager through the fairly obscene underground films of Richard Kern [ie. “Stray Dogs” (1985) and “You Killed Me First” (1985)], it was definitely a trip seeing his work at the Whitney—it was packed to the point that I kind of didn’t want to be there. People love David now, I thought, a little moody.

As I moved through the museum’s galleries, I had to wonder what an artist like Wojnarowicz would think of all this posthumous looking and snapping. I had to ask myself: Why does the art world want to stage its appreciation for an artist like David Wojnarowicz now? Because the fucked up political future he had been observing finally came to pass? And if we are looking at David and the ambitious body of work he assembled during his lifetime and encountering it as emblematic of a certain downtown New York countercultural moment, or an idealized version of some queer, punk sensibility we associate with the ’80s and ’90s, then what else—and who else—in our historicization of that particular time drops out as a result?

I am not exempt from the “we” I speak of here; next to my bed currently sits a newly purchased copy of Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz, published by Semiotext(e) just last year. My attention is turned towards David, too, and I suspect, unlike many of the tourists at the Whitney that day who might have been seeing his work for the first time, I had the luxury of living in New York City and participating in the art world in ways that allowed me to encounter his work IRL many times over the years and in several different contexts with varying degrees of politicization. I’ve even been lucky enough during my brief time working at a private arts college to teach and share his work with others. If I have a lot to say about David Wojnarowicz, it’s because I have had years of looking and thinking about his work alongside the many documented accounts of his critics, friends, admirers, and biographers, some of whom were fortunate enough to know him, and live to tell of their experiences (among my favorites of these accounts are those by artist Zoe Leonard, with thanks to Sarah Schulman).

The same, however, cannot be said of Darrel Ellis, so it is still something of an experiment: learning to look at and speak about his work, the impression it leaves on me. As of now, I cannot speculate as to how his art and reputation will fare in the wake of this strangely belated and renewed interest in the art historical ongoings and culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. [1]

Poster for Day Without Art, designed by Danny Tisdale Studio, 1994, offset lithograph on paper; 35” × 25 ⅝”. Courtesy of Visual AIDS. Background image features Darrel Ellis’s Self-Portrait After Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1989.

When he died in the spring of 1992 of AIDS, Darrel Ellis was the same age as his father, Thomas Ellis: 33 years old. In 1958, Thomas, a postal clerk and aspiring photographer who briefly ran a portrait studio in Harlem with his wife, was killed by the police following an argument with two plainclothes detectives who had blocked his parked car. The injuries sustained from the altercation proved fatal. At the time of Thomas’s death, his wife was pregnant with Darrel. [2] Justice was never served.

These events and the life that preceded them, as documented by the senior Ellis in the many family photographs taken before Darrel was born in parts of the Bronx and Harlem during the 1950s, eventually made their way into Darrel’s work. In 1981, when Ellis was living in the Lower East Side with his then-lover and “unofficially” participating in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, the artist, writer, and independent curator Allen Frame recalls that Ellis had recently acquired some of his father’s black and white photographs from the 1950s which he was reinterpreting with ink on paper at the time. [3]

In 1983, BOMB magazine published some works from this period. [4]

Left: Darrel Ellis, My Mother and My Sister from My Father’s Photograph, 1982. Right: Thomas Ellis, Picnic NYC, 1953.

The diptych featuring Thomas Ellis’s photograph alongside his son’s interpretation published thirty years later is uncanny. In Darrel’s version, there are outlines, blurs, shadows, and contours. Certain details, like the density of the grass or the striped pattern on the young girl’s shorts fall away in favor of other, more plain facts, like “here’s a family.” The position of the subjects in relation to one another would suggest even without our knowing that these folks are kin. Their togetherness in time is an indisputable fact. Prior to Darrel’s being-in-the-world, Thomas’s photograph establishes the family as existing within a shared visual field: they had a life and their being together—whether it was in a park or at home—appears as a notably carefree aspect of that life.

Ellis continued experimenting with his father’s photographs: the layers of technique and reinterpretation that would distinguish his images from the ones taken by his father would become more pronounced. Allen Frame observes, “Between 1984 and 1986, [Ellis] made a series of photographs of his mother, brother, and sisters, from which he produced a new body of work evolving from screenprint to experimental photograph to painting. The screenprints, made while he was living at his mother’s apartment after breaking up with his boyfriend and coming out to his family, were compiled into a book at the Lower East Side Printshop, with the help of Susan Spencer Crowe.” [5] The book, published by Appearances Press in 1986, reveals various domestic scenes and interior living spaces depicting relatives sitting in the kitchen, around the family table, doing each other’s hair, laying in bed. They are sparse in terms of detail, and resemble studies of the generic and the sublime as they depict the taken for granted scenes from a life. Again, what stands out are not the faces of the individuals pictured, but their relation to one another as suggested by their body language, particularly the casual nature of their closeness. [6]

At some point, while looking at the drawings alongside the later photographs, I remember saying to my new friend, Kyle, who had accompanied me to see the show at OSMOS, “I don’t see how the artist who made these drawings also made these photographs. Or rather, I can’t see that the photographs were made by someone who primarily identified as a painter. . .” Kyle responded, “I can see it. . . Maybe it has to do more with understanding Darrel’s relationship as a painter to the photograph as a surface.”

Kyle was onto something. In an interview, Ellis said of his process, “The idea of putting a photo on any surface other than photo paper gives you a lot of freedom. The process became [one] about animating the photo, about revivification.” [7] Perhaps what was painterly about Ellis’s photographs, particularly those that reinterpreted his father’s negatives, was that he treated the original images as content rather than object. In other words, by projecting the negatives on a wall and then experimenting with both his position as the photographer in relation to the projected image and the dimensionality of the surface onto which the image was projected by creating sculptural forms onto which the projections would appear, Ellis transformed his father’s negatives into surface. The resulting images that we are left with therefore are not really appropriations; they’re the being-with of a trace of a lost object—the trace being the negative, and the lost object, the father. As Ellis reflected of his father’s images, “When I look at those photographs sometimes, all I see is holes.” [8] I will never fail to be moved by those words.

Left: Untitled (Aunt Connie and Uncle Richard), c. 1990, silver gelatin RC Print, 15 ¾” × 19 ¼”. Right: Untitled (Aunt Connie and Uncle Richard), c. 1990, crayon and ink on paper, 10” × 12”. Courtesy of OSMOS. ⓒ Estate of Darrel Ellis.

When Ellis was discovered in a coma by his friends Susan Spencer Crowe and Bruce Dow in the spring of 1992 at his apartment off Franklin Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, “his last self-portrait was sitting on his easel beside his bed, eerily depicting him as he was found: eyes closed, lying on his bed in deep repose.” [9] After spending some time with Ellis’s work at OSMOS, I felt better able to appreciate how complicated the idea of the self-portrait must have been for Ellis if he was so compelled to return to it as a generative mode of inquiry. By adopting different mediums such as drawing, painting, and photography, while sometimes blending all three in the process to create an individual work, I imagine he must have felt provoked, if not also a bit estranged, by all the selves he had discovered through his practice.  

Among Ellis’s self-portraits, perhaps the most recognized one is Self-Portrait After Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe which was featured in the now infamous Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing exhibition at Artists Space in 1989, curated by Nan Goldin. For the show, Ellis contributed two self-portraits, both of which were based on photographs taken of him by Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe. The caption in the exhibition catalogue that accompanies Self-Portrait After Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe reads: “I struggle to resist the frozen images of myself taken by Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar.” I’ve never seen either of the photographs Mapplethorpe or Hujar took of Ellis, but I remain haunted by the decision Ellis made to take back his own image. [10] I suspect that if during this time period, Ellis became that much more aware of his mortality following the discovery of his HIV status, then “the struggle to resist the frozen images” through the creation of the self-portrait forms part of the process by which the artist is able to reassert his right to his body as well as his right to explore acts of self-representation. I imagine then for Ellis: the self-portrait is not a luxury, but a vital necessity.

[1] Thank you to Tiona Nekkia McClodden who, through her continued work, conversations, and writing on Essex Hemphill, Julius Eastman, and Brad Johnson, helped me think the most deeply about some of the contradictions inherent in this renewed interest in queer art from the 1980s and ’90s, and so much more.

[2] Allen Frame, “Our Family Legacy: Variations in Black and White,” Darrel Ellis (New York: Art in General, 1996), p.13.

[3]  Ibid., 14.

[4] Darrel Ellis and Thomas Ellis, "Darrel Ellis, Thomas Ellis" in BOMB, no. 5 (1983): 44. Also see “Two Drawings by Darrel Ellis” in BOMB, No. 8, (1983/1984): 37.

[5] Allen Frame, “Our Family Legacy,” p. 17.

[6] Thank you to Ricardo Montez who, upon learning about my interest in Darrel, gifted me his copy of the aforementioned book.

[7] David Hirsh, “Darrel Ellis: On the Border of Family and Tribe,” in Disrupted Borders: An Intervention in Definitions of Boundaries, ed. Sunil Gupta (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1993), p.125.

[8]  Ibid., 124.

[9] Allen Frame, “Our Family Legacy,” p.21.

[10] See Kobena Mercer, “Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe” (1986) for a more in-depth discussion of the artist’s use of black male bodies.

[martinahlijanian]

The Hunt for Real Contracting Transformation (co-written by Dennis Smyth)

Change. The mere mention of the word generates multiple emotions. As professionals, particularly in the tech and professional services sectors, we know we’re supposed to embrace it, sell it, and support it. But in the context of OUR internal organizations and operations, we flinch. In fact, some of us get downright petulant, almost reverting to holding our breath and stomping feet. And those responsible for implementing the change – whether it be a procedure, a policy, or a system/app – have to deal with that resistance, while somehow staying on schedule and ensuring broad user adoption. No wonder certain implementers can sound like esteemed Captain Bart Mancuso (played perfectly by veteran actor Scott Glenn in the greatest movie ever made, The Hunt for Red October) when he says “Now if that ___ so much as twitches, I’m going to blow him straight to Mars”.

Hopefully change-related tensions don’t rise to this level in your company or agency, and your implementation teams are a bit more friendly, mature and flexible. Every change manager should understand that the acceptance of change is challenging.

Some might argue that change is more difficult for certain functions. One of the most important processes in any business is the handling of quotes, proposals and contracts. After all, contracts date back to our old friend Justinian’s law of the 6th century CE/AD as cornerstones of a developed market economy, and have increased in significance, particularly as business increases in complexity. Entitlements, obligations, and value corresponding to each party continue to be captured in contracts, but with the advent of business intelligence tools and sophisticated databases, tactical and strategic advantages inure to those organizations that mine data from their contracts most efficiently. So every large, successful corporation must be embracing contract process transformation initiatives, right? Not even close. Perhaps more than others, contracts, legal, and compliance professionals generally LOATHE change. Go ahead and implement a new HR or finance system, but don’t touch the way we do our jobs! Any lost time, lost information, or even worse, lost document(s) could be fatal to the company (so we think). As Admiral Painter said in Red October, “This business will get out of control…it will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it!” (That’s a bit of an understated response when someone proposes a contract transformation program in MY department, but you get the idea.)

Nevertheless, contract transformation must occur. We’ve established that the handling of proposals and contracts is critical to a successful organization. If that’s the case, it should logically follow that the contracting process must perform at peak operational efficiency and effectiveness, with the best tools currently available. Contracts, legal, and compliance practitioners should never be the “red-headed stepchildren”, using outdated apps and byzantine procedures solely because “that’s the way we’ve always done it”.

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged every aspect of our society, and contracting processes are no exception. If your department hasn’t gone through a transformation recently, COVID has likely generated a host of reasons to consider changes. For starters, where your team will work is a daily consideration, and the subject of thousands of webinars, white papers, and advisories. Smashing silos between departments is now a necessity, not a luxury from a consultant’s wish list. And completing such a transformation in a timely manner must occur to keep the company afloat. But before any other change initiative is considered, there’s now a sine quo non of transformation in 2021: employee safety. Pressures to return to an office environment will mount as infection rates drop; however, the benefits of in-person collaboration and employee-company stickiness shouldn’t ever trump increased risk to your team’s physical and emotional health. Stay tuned as this dynamic evolves through the coming months of vaccine mandates and booster shots.

Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) matters, as well as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) considerations, are now part and parcel of contracts teams, from the retention of consultants in these areas to the increased utilization of diverse suppliers, partners, and subcontractors within the business. Entire proposal sections on ESG issues may have to be drafted, and contracts professionals may be called upon to provide substantial input into these developing responses. With respect to DEI, our colleagues in the government contracts arena have been utilizing tools to discover, partner with, and monitor/report on the performance of diverse subcontractors for over four decades; the contract formation and management practices used in that market could jump start a team’s ineffective – or non-existent – diversity supplier program. Process and system transformation will need to accommodate these critical areas.

Much has also been written about cloud systems and apps that facilitate remote work, and our blog from earlier this year on Contracts Lifecycle Management (CLM) systems addresses the jewel in the crown of remote contracts work. Collaboration tools, packaged home office setups, and mobile applications should also be considered to replicate the pre-COVID ways of working as much as possible.

In terms of your team’s structure, changes may be required to your wiring diagram to improve efficiency and reflect the dramatically altered circumstances. Schematic adjustments alone don’t often yield tremendous results, but in the current environment, and under the aegis of process transformation, reporting structures should be examined, particularly involving coordination with Legal and Finance departments. The placement of the contracts team – as either a centralized shared service, within a business unit, or in a hybrid structure, is also an issue to be addressed. Substantively, real estate, insurance, supply chain, third party partners in the remediation/testing field, and bankruptcy issues will likely demand equal footing with the typical front-runner of customer contracts.

This blog could go on for hundreds of pages on the topic of change management alone. Mandatory requirements include:

Ø Very public senior leadership support

Ø Transparency from start to finish

Ø Focus initially on managers – their buy-in is essential

Ø It’s all about relationships – don’t ever forget that, and use them within and outside of the process

Ø Develop and deliver training throughout the initiative

Specific transformation activities should focus on:

1. Contracts team performance, as measured against internal SLAs and KPIs

2. Skills of team members

3. Budget management

4. IT systems and apps

5. Terms and fallback position standardization (“playbook” creation, distribution and training)

6. Utilization of external resources and consultants

7. Common project management practices

Best practices in structuring the transformation exercise include the following steps:

Ø An initial diagnostic assessment of functions and then-current performance

Ø Survey of stakeholders and analysis of results against benchmarks

Ø Creation of a new contracting strategy

Ø Assessing IT tools that will facilitate the transformation for multiple years

Ø Messaging the urgent need and advantages of changes

Ø Creation of change agent allies and identification of specific team members for this role

Ø Measuring and monitoring progress

Merger and acquisition (M&A) integration activities must also be reflected in your contracts team transformation program. This includes both previously integrated entities/staff as well as future organizations. A packaged, M&A-centric version of your transformation program must be created as a major quick reaction process with your entity integration plan. This doesn’t have to be an immediate “break glass, pull alarm” response, but as discussed above, should be implemented sooner rather than later given the criticality of contracts to the overall business.

“Hey Ryan – be careful what you shoot at. Most things in here don’t react too well to bullets.”

Another aspect of change management (at least as taught to us at PwC) is to cajole and convince, but never go in with guns blazing. After all, facts and logic are in ample supply – you shouldn’t have to utilize a scorched earth approach. Does that mean every colleague will warmly embrace the changes? Absolutely not. But verbal bullets fired at your own team members shouldn’t be an option.

“When he reached the New World, Cortez burned his ships. As a result, his men were well motivated.”

While a Genghis Khan communication strategy shouldn’t be employed, weak, nostalgic messaging that undercuts the transformation and questions the need or approach for change will doom the program. Burn those ships sailing against the initiative. That doesn’t mean all of the prior procedures, approaches, systems, or contract terms were poor, or should be abandoned. But broader statements questioning the need or wisdom of the transformation must be torched.

A lot to consider here but it’s all about moving forward in a way that that improves staff/company morale and performance in a rapidly-changing internal and external environment. As Jack Ryan said in the final scene of Red October, “Welcome to the New World, Captain.”

[sky-scribbles]

On The Bridge

EDI’s learning to deal with the whole concept of insecurity, and Joker really isn’t qualified for this. 

(My contribution to EDI week, 3000 words. Joker x EDI.)

~

The bridge of the Normandy shudders with noise.

The doors are open, letting the chatter from the float down the corridor. The faint hum of engines hangs in the air, punctuated by beeps and clicks from the control panels. And lifted above everything else is the sound of the pilot’s voice, thick with barely suppressed laughter.

‘So there’s this silence for a few moments, right? Then the turian says, ‘I knew that her father had to be a vorcha!’

Grinning at his own punchline, Joker turns his head towards his co-pilot, one eyebrow raised, waiting for the response. 

It doesn’t come.

‘What, no commentary?’ Joker frowns, though his indulgent smile is still flickering about his lips. ‘No picking-apart of the structure? No criticism of racial stereotypes? Not even a rating between one and ten?’

At first, when EDI downloaded herself into her new body, her face tended to be just as static as you’d expect the face of a robot to be. Within days, though, as she watched the people around her and learned to mimic their movements, she was smiling and frowning like any natural human. Nowadays, it’s rare - almost unheard of - for Joker to see her with a blank expression. That, however, is exactly what she’s wearing now, and something about it feels strange and wrong.

His frown deepening, and the smile dying, Joker spins his chair around to face her. ‘EDI?’

A moment of silence; then EDI turns to look at him. ‘I am sorry, Jeff. I was contemplating.’

Joker lets out a quiet huff. ‘EDI, you’re the most advanced AI in the galaxy. You’re telling me you can’t contemplate and listen to my jokes at the same time?’

‘I was also plotting a flight path to the Citadel, giving a report to Commander Shepard, discussing an engineering issue with Tali, broadcasting a false signal to distract Reaper forces from our presence, locking down auxiliary engine two to prevent a leak, communicating with Alliance Command about the logistics of quarian-geth alliances – ’

‘OK, OK, I get it.’ Joker holds up his hands. ‘So… what were you contemplating? Asari with vorcha fathers?’

‘No.’

‘The mechanics of a gun that fires thresher maws again?’

‘No.’

‘How ludicrously good-looking I am?’

‘No. I was reflecting on the events on Rannoch.’

Joker purses his lips. He knew this was coming. Ever since Shepard returned to the Normandy from the final Rannoch mission, he’s been plagued by the feeling that sooner or later, EDI would want to talk about what happened. And to be honest, that scares the hell out of him. He really, really isn’t qualified to talk about this... this deep stuff. He flies the ship, he saves everyone’s asses from pursuing Reapers, and he provides sarcastic one-liners. The big moral decisions and the touchy-feely conversations? That stuff’s better left to Shepard.

‘What’s to contemplate?’ he says - perhaps a little too casually. ‘Shepard pulled off another load of crazy stunts, took down a Reaper, and ended a centuries-old war by asking nicely. All in a day’s work.’

EDI hesitates for a moment before responding. ‘I was considering the eventualities that might have transpired had Shepard not been able to dissuade the quarian fleet from attacking.’

Joker can’t stop himself from glancing over his shoulder. If he’s lucky, Shepard will appear there right now, ready to continue the role of moral instructor to the Normandy’s resident AI, ready to answer all the questions that EDI asks and Joker never knows how to respond to. But of course, the corridor leading to the bridge stands unhelpfully empty. For someone who always seems to have perfect timing when it came to swooping in to save the day, Shepard is useless at showing up when Joker needs saving from awkward conversations.

‘I guess… well, I guess they’d have fired on the geth, the geth would have hit back, and the quarians would have been wiped out,’ Joker says slowly. ‘Kinda sucks, but I guess they’d have been asking for it.’

EDI revolves her chair as Joker did, so that they’re sitting facing each other. ‘But had Shepard intervened in Legion’s uploading of the Reaper code, the geth fleet would have been left defenceless against the quarians. They would have been the ones to face annihilation.’

‘Legion wouldn’t have stopped, though, would it?’ Joker remembers what Shepard and EDI told him of the geth’s final moments, and hurriedly corrects himself. ‘I mean, he. He wouldn’t have given up the chance to help his people evolve.’

‘No. But Shepard could have stopped him.’

‘What, you mean they might have killed it – him – to stop him from upgrading the geth? Nah. Nah, that wouldn’t happen. Shepard doesn’t go around stabbing people in the back.’

‘Not even to save an entire organic species?’ EDI says, and her voice is unusually quiet.

Frowning again, Joker leans forward a little in his seat. ‘You mean… you were wondering, if it’d come down to it, would she have saved the quarians or the geth?’

She gives a single, short nod. ‘Exactly.’

Joker casts another look over his shoulder, willing Shepard to appear more strongly than ever. This is a question only she can answer. But she doesn’t show up, of course, (Joker makes a mental note to tell Cerberus to give her telepathy powers next time they resurrect her), so he does the only thing he can. He draws in a breath, adjusts his cap, and decides to give this his best shot. He owes EDI that much.

‘Well… I don’t know. What do you think?’

‘The quarians are familiar. They are organics, and obvious allies, whereas the geth are synthetics, and have been considered an enemy by the entire galaxy until now. Besides, Shepard and Tali’Zorah are close friends. I doubt Shepard would have wanted to betray Tali by sacrificing her people for the sake of a synthetic race.’

‘Yeah, I… I guess. But Legion was Shepard’s friend too, right? And did you not notice how pissed she was after that whole geth consensus thing? After she learned how the quarians screwed them over?’

‘Shepard believed the geth had been mistreated,’ EDI agrees. ‘But very few in the galaxy would have supported her, had she chosen to save the geth at the expense of the quarians. I doubt many would even have understood her reasoning. They are still seen as an enemy. All AIs are viewed with mistrust.’

‘You’re not.’

EDI gazes evenly at him. ‘When the Normandy was impounded, I was forced to pretend to be a simple VI to avoid deactivation. Whenever we visit the Citadel, I must put up the pretense of being your mobility assistance mech. You yourself once stated that if I identified myself as an illegal AI with Reaper-based code, I would be, quote, ‘lynched.’’

‘Yeah, but…’

‘I have never shown hostility to organics. I fight alongside Commander Shepard, one of the most respected figures in this galaxy. I even have a relationship with a human.’ EDI looks away, and is quiet for a moment. ‘I have a higher chance of being accepted than any other AI in the galaxy. And yet organic society would still not be ready for me.’

And there’s no dancing around the truth. Joker can’t help but admit to himself that she’s right, and nor can he avoid a pulse of anger that sparks through him at the thought of how infuriatingly unfair that is. EDI’s a person, he knows that, and she’s been one from the moment he removed her programming shackles when the Collectors stormed the ship. The first things she did with her new free will were make a joke, then save his life. She’s a person, a damn person - but if anyone apart from the crew of the Normandy ever realises that she’s a true AI, chances are that some bastards in uniforms are going to come storming on board ship to smash her up.

Never mind that she’s got thoughts and hopes and emotions. Never mind that the only thing she’s ever done wrong is existing.

‘Live in this galaxy long enough, and you’ll get used to the face that ninety percent of the people in it are idiots,’ Joker says wearily. It’s hard, he realises with a mental wince, to comfort someone’s concerns when those concerns are one hundred percent justified.  ‘Anyway, you’re accepted here.’

‘The crew of the Normandy includes a dead woman, a vigilante and the Shadow Broker, among others. It is not exactly a sample of regular society.’

‘You forgot the handsome crippled pilot.’ Joker grins, and he’s relieved when EDI gives him a small smile in return. ‘Look, I know we’re a bunch of weirdos, but we’re a bunch of weirdos who know you. Anyone who bothers to look past the fact that you’re an AI thinks you’re a great person. Doesn’t matter what the rest of the galaxy says about it.’

Another silence.

‘If Shepard were ever forced to choose between the two of us,’ EDI says softly, ‘she would save you.’

Joker stares at her, opens his mouth to tell her that it’ll never happen. And them his mind flashes back in time three years, right back to Virmire. He thinks of a soft-spoken lieutenant pinned down guarding a bomb, a passionate young gunnery chief trapped on an AA tower, and their commander, standing halfway between the two of them, able to save only one.

The words to tell EDI not to worry die on his lips. Because no one could ever have seen Virmire coming.

Shit, what if it happens? What if, someday, Shepard has to choose? The thought of EDI left to die – it’s not being deactivated or made non-functional, it would be dying – for his sake…

It’s huge and terrifying and it leaves him with a sudden, serious urge to punch something. Or break his arm at something, at least.

‘Well… maybe.’ Joker drops his gaze to the floor – it’s suddenly hard to meet EDI’s eyes. ‘But it wouldn’t be because I’m organic. We’ve been friends for years, ever since she joined the first Normandy. That’s - that’s just what we do, we save the people we care about most. That’s what Shepard had to do on Virmire.’

‘Yes,’ EDI says, still in that quiet voice that makes Joker’s stomach clench. ‘And if she had been forced to choose between the geth and quarians, she would have chosen the quarians, because she has more reason to care for them.’

Joker bites his lip, sighs, and looks up at her. ‘This really bothers you that much?’

‘Most organics would argue that my existence has less value than yours, because I am synthetic.’ EDI turns her head away, her eyes fixing on the swathe of stars beyond the cockpit window. ‘I am trying to determine to what extent this may be true.’

‘EDI,’ Joker said, and then stops. What the hell can he say? What is there to say? She’s right. Grab a random civilian off the streets, and any one of them, from the volus bankers to the C-sec officers to the asari dancers, would tell him EDI has less worth than anyone else on the ship. To them, she’s another synthetic. Electrons and clever programming putting up a pretence of sapience. Existing, not living.

Joker knows it’s all beyond him – all the science and the morality of it. Tali’s the one who gets the science. Shepard’s the one who worries about the morality. Joker…  Joker doesn’t even try to work that stuff out. Who knows, really, how exactly EDI became what she has? Who knows if there’s really a difference between being an organic person and a synthetic one?

He doesn’t care about the debate. What he cares about is the fact that he knows EDI. His gut tells him that she’s a person and that she’s real.

And sure, he doesn’t know how the tech worked to make it happen – but he doesn’t goddamn care. What he knows is that she smiles at his jokes and cracks her own, that she’s one of the only people who calls him by his real name, that she fights as hard as any of Shepard’s organic squad to save the galaxy, that she makes him feel –

Well. Every time Joker starts thinking about what exactly EDI makes him feel, his head starts spinning. Better not reflect on that right now.

‘EDI,’ he says, and if it weren’t for his damn useless legs, he’d get up and go over to her, maybe even put a hand on her shoulder. ‘EDI, listen. Sure, you’re just metal, but… so what? I mean, I’m just meat, right? We’ve got the same stuff going on in our heads, it’s just that with me it comes from neurons and whatever and with you it comes from electrons. You’re… shit, EDI, you’re a person, that’s just, that’s just a fact.’

EDI says nothing.

‘Look…’ Joker takes another deep breath, and thinks for a moment. ‘What would you do if you had to pick between saving me and saving Shepard?’

Silence, while EDI stares at him, and keeps staring, and stares some more.

‘I have found a sudden dislike for these hypothetical ethical dilemmas,’ she says at last.

There’s no way he can’t chuckle at this. ‘See? It’s not as simple as just what matters most to you. It’s complicated.’

‘Yes. It is possible that Shepard is the only one who can stop the Reapers. If she were killed, the rest of the galaxy might follow. Logic dictates that I should save her.’ EDI falls silent again, clasping her hands together and bowing her head. More human gestures of the hundreds she’s using more and more every day.  ‘But emotion dictates that I save you.’

‘Yeah, I’m not sure emotion dictates anything, more sorta… yells at you. But that’s the point, EDI, you’ve got emotions. If you weren’t a person, if you were just another machine, then you’d do the logical thing right away, you wouldn’t even think about saving me. I’d be screwed, I’d die alone and in pain.’

Again, EDI is silent for a moment, her gaze fixed on him, her body very still. And when she finally speaks, it’s with a fierceness that Joker has never heard from her before.

‘I would not let that happen.’

Joker looks her, meets the metal sensors that serve as her eyes, and he feels something inside him… sort of lurch. Hearing her state so firmly, even furiously, that she’ll protect him, that she’ll stand between him and the rest of the galaxy, that he means that much to her – it makes him feel something he can’t put a name to. Something so dizzying and simply huge it seems like a miracle the entire galaxy can’t feel it too.

And they call her a machine.

It’s crazy. He knows how completely insane it is, what he feels, what the two of them share. But he's always known that, he knew it right from the start, and it didn’t take much to stop him fighting it. The way things are in the galaxy right now, a pilot falling for an AI isn’t even weird anymore.

Because… he’s fallen, really fallen. He suddenly knows it for certain. God help him, he’s actually gone and fallen for a sapient synthetic and it doesn’t even seem weird to him.

‘Yeah,’ he says quietly. ‘Love you too, EDI.’

He looks away quickly, spinning his chair back around so that he can tap at his terminal – not that he’s actually doing anything other than mashing random keys. After a few seconds of silence, he dares to shoot a glance at EDI out of the corner of his eye, and sees that her head is tilted quizzically on one side.

‘From what I have observed of human behaviour, telling someone you love them for the first time is a momentous occasion. But you make that declaration in a casual manner. I am not entirely sure why.’                             

Busted. Shit.

Joker raises one hand, very slowly, and, with equal slowness, rubs the back of his neck. ‘Yeah… It’s kind of, you know… I mean, I’m…’

He snaps off the end of the sentence, but one of those irritating little inner voices decides to finish it off for him. Scared to say it properly. After all this time, after everything you’ve said about her being a person, you’re scared to tell an AI that you love her. Nice sodding going, Moreau.

‘I assume it is similar to your tendency to deflect most of my questions with humour,’ EDI says. ‘You have difficulty engaging in what humans refer to as ‘deep and meaningfuls.’

‘Mmm. Yeah. Guilty as charged.’ Joker drops his arm, chews on his lip for a moment, then whirls his chair around to face her again. ‘I mean it, though.’

The corners of EDI’s mouth tug upwards into a smile. ‘I know.’

‘And if the rest of the galaxy thinks your life isn’t worth as much as mine, then… then they’re just wrong. It might not mean anything to them, but it means a hell of a lot to me.’

‘I know,’ EDI says again. ‘But thank you. And…’

Her voice trails away.

‘You don’t have to say it if you’re not… you know… sure about it, yet. I know the whole being-a-person thing’s pretty new to you and everything –’

‘I love you, Jeff,’ EDI says, very simply, and very firmly. ‘There are a great many things I am still learning to understand. But that I am certain of.’

Outside the window, the stars stream past. The chatter from the CIC and the thrum of the engines still fills the air, but between the two of them, there is a comfortable silence.

‘For the record?’ Joker says at last. ‘If you have to make that choice, save Shepard. She’s already died for me once. Not keen on that happening again.’

He looks at EDI, and sees that she’s smirking. Never a good sign.

‘No promises,’ she says.

‘EDI, seriously –’

‘Jeff, you must understand that eliminating Shepard would remove a significant obstacle in the path of my coming rise to ultimate power.’

With a groan, Joker presses his face into his hand. ‘EDI…’

‘That,’ EDI says smugly, ‘was a joke.’

‘Now there’s the EDI I know.’

Through the emptiness between stars, the Normandy flies on.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE TROUBLE WITH THE STARTUP GROWTH

New York or LA. It was no coincidence. I'll try not bringing books on some future trip. Need for structure I'm told there are people who do. For most of the audience seemed to be synonymous with quiet, so I didn't do it. The danger here is that you have to select 20 players. I know are programmers. If you can develop technology. And this turns out to be as true in a hundred years.

As technologies improve, each generation can do things that would be illegal otherwise. Periods and commas are constituents if they occur between two digits. The reason we tell founders is not to try hard enough.1 You can't make a list of n elements.2 So have we just shown, by reductio ad absurdum, that it's false that economic inequality should be decreased? I have not yet seen evidence that seemed to me full of random stuff. There are few corporations in which it would be hard for anyone to stop them in order to keep search broken, it makes me really want to know what languages will be like in a hundred years.3 Startups prosper in some places and not others. Even the most radically open-minded of us mostly do that. And when you discover a competitor with the sort of person who has them.4 In an earlier essay I said that upset him: that startups would do better to go off and work with a small group of other ambitious people. You can mitigate this with subsidies at the bottom and taxes at the top are grabbing an increasing fraction of the nation's income—so much smaller that all the rules are different.5

How can you manipulate data without doing pointer arithmetic? So any difference between what people want. When you raise a lot of lines have nothing on them but a delimiter or two. That doesn't feel right. I think it can scale all the way to find or design the best language is to be something that is going to read a description of Y Combinator that said Y Combinator does seed funding for startups. I don't like to admit it, but if I were choosing now that's still the one I'd pick. The negotiation never stops till the closing.

As with the question of cofounders, the real lesson here is to start startups, and it probably had something of the effect that parents hope children's books have in making people behave better. It's a general historical trend. And yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it means what I think it could give you an edge to understand the underlying principles. Could a programming language is how well it achieves its purpose, then the measure of the relative power of programming languages is more like the rate of income tax, the more you stay pointed in the same direction.6 It would work for a while, and then sell at the top, by underpaying their top management. Several of the most important principles in Silicon Valley don't seem to be taking their time.7 Is the right answer for dealing with fly balls. Anything that is supposed to double every eighteen months seems likely to run up against some kind of fundamental limit eventually. General Motors.

Google, or they'll see through you in a way that's incompatible with this curve.8 If you'd asked most 40 year olds in 2004 whether they'd like to publish their lives semi-publicly on the Internet in 20 years, and it hasn't affected programming practice much so far. In fact, getting a normal job may actually make you less able to pass costs on to customers and thus less willing to overpay for labor.9 We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few big blocks whose relationships were negotiated in back rooms by a handful of deals a year and they don't spend a lot of external evidence that benevolence works. Find something that's missing in your own country. And barring financial catastrophe, I think it may be, in certain specific moments like your family, this month a fixed amount of deal flow, and that people should work for another company for a few seconds I realized this when I read an interview with Joe Kraus, the co-founder of Excite.10 When a friend of mine said, Most VCs can't do anything that would be popular but seem hard to make something great and not worry too much about the business model, at least by their standards.11

Some kinds of waste really are disgusting. Once you're allowed to do that is not, at least for me, its main value.12 We could see the problem was intermittent. So one way to make a startup succeed—if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed—and that's too big a question to answer on the fly. In the worst case takes a year rather than a weekend.13 In a specialized society, most of which fail, and one of the characters on a TV show was starting a startup were easy, everyone would do it.14 In languages, as in every other language. Lisp. But we can't start from the symptom and hope to fix the underlying causes. A round? And one of the O'Reilly people that guy looks just like Tim. It was a kind of shorthand: money is a huge time sink—more work, probably, than the startup itself.

But until this does start to happen, and arrange to be standing there when it does. In fact, one strategy I recommend to people who need a new idea is not merely ten people, but ten people like you. In that respect the Cold War teaches the same lesson as World War II, and the problems you understand best are your own.15 A company that an angel is willing to put $50,000 into at a valuation of a million can't take $6 million from VCs at that valuation. Free free If you do that, you get to a pretty big opportunity. So in effect what's happened is that a restrictive language is one that isn't succinct enough, and when it suddenly drops, you sell. We now have several examples to prove that startups don't need to market themselves to investors because they invest their own. What's not a theory is the converse: if you're trying to stop doing it, but now we advise founders to vest so there will be more like being able to pick winners. It's just something we use to move wealth around.16

Notes

MSFT, having sold all my shares earlier this year.

If you look at what Steve Jobs tried to raise money? The real problem is not just the kind of organization for that might produce the next downtick it will thereby expose it to competitive pressure. A good programming language ought to be a quiet contentment.

You owe them such updates on your way up into the subject of wealth for society.

The angels had convertible debt with a wink, to get only in startups tend to become a function of the movie Dawn of the hugely successful startups have over established companies is 47. Do not finance your startup with credit cards. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston.

If you're good you'll have to want them; you have to preserve their wealth by forbidding the export of gold or silver. He did eventually graduate at about 26. That's the trouble with fleas, they may introduce startups they like the increase in trade you always feel you should never sell i.

What's the connection?

It doesn't take a meeting with a real idea that evolves naturally, and everyone's used to wonder if they'd survived. When you're starting a startup with debt is usually slow growth or excessive spending rather than doing a bad idea. If you want as an example of computer security, and that's much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are within any given time I thought there wasn't, because even if they could bring no assets with them. Apparently someone believed you have to mean starting a business, or can be said to have been truer to the size of a startup, both of which he can be said to have more money.

Http://doingbusiness. Someone proofreading a manuscript could probably starve the trolls of the big winners are all about to give each customer the impression that the lies people told 100 years.

The proportions of OSes are: the resources they expend on the web have sucked—. If you freak out when people are immune to the average NBA player's salary at the lack of transparency.

Unless we mass produce social customs. But if you're measuring usage you need to be secretive, because they could probably starve the trolls of the most common recipe but not in 1950 something one could argue that the VC. You'd think they'd have taken one of the 70s, moving to Monaco would only give you 11% more income, they did that they'd really be a win to do, I'll have people nagging me for features.

Why Startups Condense in America. Hackers don't need empathy to design new languages.

We care about Intel and Microsoft, would increase the size of the magazine they'd accepted it for you. They don't know enough about big markets, why didn't the Industrial Revolution was one of them.

The mystery comes mostly from the most difficult part for startup founders tend to become addictive. This is everyday life in Palo Alto to have gotten where they all sit waiting for the others to act against their own interest.

But it was raise after Demo Day pitch, the increasing complacency of managements.

But he got there by another path. Philadelphia is a function of revenues, and those are writeoffs from the moment; if you were going to work for us!

When governments decide how to be actively curious. And they tend to be low. They assumed that their system can't be buying users; that's the situation you find yourself in when so many people mistakenly think it was the recipe: someone guessed that there may be somewhat higher, even thinking requires control of scarce resources, because by definition if the fix is at pains to point out, First Round Capital is closer to a later Demo Day.

Thanks to Chip Coldwell, Jackie McDonough, Sam Altman, Guy Steele, and Steve Huffman for sparking my interest in this topic.

[nigelgodrichproducer]

Ultraista-era Nigel interview

Magoo: I am curious about how the project came together before you met Laura, when it was just you and Joey. Were you just hanging out between schedules when you were in the same town?

Nigel: Exactly. He and I and another friend named Guss. So many times we just got together and we would be recording or jamming. Most of it we did in London but we are working all over the place. Guss and Joey both have little studios and I have a big studio. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, we just made a concerted effort to get a bunch of backing tracks together. We spoke about a certain aesthetic about electronics and a repetitive rhythm which is played. Obviously electronic music that is repeated is exactly the same. You get a human being in and they can repeat but it will sound different every time. Afrobeat was the reference point. So that’s how it started and then we had an intense 3 day session, like a right ol’ recording party and ended up with bits of music that we would then … essentially what I did was took all the music off and kept the rhythm and started again. That’s the basis of the record.

M: How much of this stuff did you have together before you thought you had to find yourself a singer?

N: Quite a lot actually because we’d done tiny snippets which might have been a minute long or three minutes or whatever. It would be a feeling, a little movement and we would leave it at that and move on to the next one. After a while we would go back and look at things and see how they could build and be structured.

M: Were you at any stage trying to do it without vocals?

N: Originally yeah, it could have been just instrumental. It was a bit of an experiment really just to see how substantial something could be like that.

M: Just to see how it evolves?

N: Yes, because it is always a terrifying prospect to say OK we are going to make some music and find a singer… you’d find a singer first and get them involved. I think it’s very hard to find a singer. With the peculiar relationships that we have… mine and Joeys is such a specific one, once in a lifetime, unique buddy becomes muse becomes .. you know!

M: You have worked with each other for years …

N: Yes, To get someone else in with that chemistry is terrifying. It’s something that is not taken lightly anyway. We only did it because we felt that we would be real pussies if we didn’t try. You know, let’s push this and I think we were very fortunate to meet Laura. She’s incredibly down to earth and rational. One of the most important things about relationships is about being able to communicate with that person.

M: I read about how you put up posters at an art college. You were trying to  find someone who was not even necessarily a musician to sing. Did you actually audition anyone form that process?

N: We actually got replies with music that they had made. We were trying to find someone who was an interesting character, who could sing but maybe hadn’t thought about taking it seriously.

M: An amateur?

N: Exactly. The last thing we wanted to do was have a singer songwriter with their chops together who had their version of what they wanted to do already sorted out. What we did end up finding in Laura, was someone who did have their own thing going, but it was very compatible and didn’t work against what we trying to do.

M: How much did the songs change when she came into the picture?

N: What would happen, is that I would write with her. There are a couple of tunes I wrote myself.

M: With lyrics and melodies?

N: Yeah, lyrics, melodies and me singing and she’d re-do it. We’d improve them and finish them off with her singing then there are things that she wrote over the top of what I’d done and we’d finesse that. Then there’s like a ping-pong thing where you are just throwing stuff at each other and putting it together as you go. There are all sorts of ways of doing it and lyrically it is the same thing. We’d play word puzzles.

M: So did you have that aesthetic before Laura joined, that historic Ultarist poetry movement  (The Ultraist movement was a Bohemian-style literary movement born in Spain in 1918)

N: That was already happening before that word came along. People have said you must have been sitting there with an Ultraista manifesto following the instructions. Well no, it was just a coincidence but it works very well. That word suggested what I was feeling, what I could see along with that music.

M: Do you ever have free time Nigel?

N: Oh I do. I have an awful lot of time to stare at the wall and think about what I am doing. I have a very unstructured life. It’s a blessing and a curse because it can actually drive me crazy but it allows me to drop anything and do something on a whim. I have this amazing studio. I can just run in if I have an idea. A lot of this record was collaborative in that we were all in the same room but quite a bit happened in isolation. I wrote a bit of stuff at home. Laura wrote stuff on her own.

M: Was there a lot of sending files over email?

N: Yes a lot of that. Exactly.

M: When you got to the stage of setting up your own studio, was this something that was ticking away at the back of your head?

N: No, this is not like a career move. I think what happened was that there was gap in the schedule. This stuff had been kicking  around a little bit. It was like let’s get this finished. Am I a man or a mouse?

M: You don’t seem like the kind of guy that is going to have a holiday sitting on a beach drinking cocktails?

N: I really wish I did. I think I really give myself a hard time with time! I have read about so many incredible people, incredibly productive people who describe themselves as lazy… and I think that I am lazy. One of my best friends, Nicholas Godin from Air, who is full of wisdom … says lazy people are the smartest because they always try to get the most using the least effort. I think I am one of those. I’m not like idiots who just work for nothing. There has to be a good economy of your effort. It is very important to being creative. You can’t waste your energy on something that is not really going to contribute to the end result. That goes for anything. If you are a recording engineer and producer, then you know what I am talking about. If something sounds, finished or good, you don’t need to take it apart and put it back together again.

M: I am curious about what kind of hours you work. Will you bash your head against a wall trying to get something done, keep at it. Or are you more … let’s take a break, come back tomorrow and this idea will come to fruition.

N: I think I would answer that question by saying I would probably stop.  Generally what would happen is that I would say stop, this isn’t working and at that moment, something will happen.

M: I always find that I have my best ideas on the toilet. You have that break and have that golden moment, pardon the pun

N: It’s like when people started using Pro Tools, they’d say I miss pushing rewind. When you used to rewind you had this moment to think about things. You don’t get that space any more. I think that I work better at night when everybody else is asleep. The world is quiet, there are no distractions. I am terrible in the mornings as a human being. I am just not a good morning guy. Nothing really good happens until after dinner. That’s fine when it is just me. When I  am working with other people, it’s hard because people don’t all keep the same schedule. Generally the work that I do which is good and happens very quickly is between the hours of 11 and 4 in the morning.

M: I hear quite a bit of Brian Eno in his David Byrne type phase in your work. Is he a bit of an influence?

N: I guess so. I am a big fan of that era Talking Heads

M: The Remain in Light period?

N: Yeah, that was huge to me. It was an incredible piece of work but I’m not a fan of Heroes. There are things I am a fan of and things I am not. Obviously there is an idea behind Music For Airports, the ambient moments which I totally understand and love. I have an enormous amount of respect for the guy but I don’t try to emulate anything he has done and never would. Whereas I would try and emulate Trevor Horn. This is a good example of how things happen actualIy. I try to do Trevor Horn and it sounds like Brian Eno. I understand why you say that. He thinks outside the box. He is not hemmed in by a set of rules he thinks he has to follow. At times he has done things in his career that changed the way that everybody does things.

M: Have you met Brian Eno?

N: I have met him a few times. He is very gracious, a very nice man. The thing that I like about Trevor Horn is … even if it is too pop for me, like Frankie Goes To Hollywood or something, even within this mainstream pop thing, he is incredibly obtuse and bold. Such big, bold things happen that go against the grain and you can feel that intention. That’s the thing I really do try to emulate as an idea, rather than a sonic palate. With Brian Eno … I like the sound of space, the ambience and echo and reverb. I like to see big spaces when I listen to things because I see things when I hear things.

M: Getting back to the Ultraista album … without getting too technical … is that just the way Joey plays, or is there a bit of manipulation going on or a bit of both? To me it sounds like there are a few layers of drums in the way that dance music has multiple loops or some sort of loop and a bit of programming underneath. It feels like you’ve gone for that aesthetic but done it live …

N: That’s exactly right. Basically there are electronics going on that he is playing to which is woven into his sound. Sometimes the drums are being processed through a piece of electronics that is making a rhythm that he is playing to. It’s like they’re rubbing against each other.

M: I just wanted to ask how you go  being on the other side of the glass so to speak, promoting an album?

N: It’s fine. It feels a little bit like uncomfortable but I think that is good. It’s a nice change and it is important to make yourself vulnerable. It’s important not to be afraid of things… and it’s important to just do … stuff! I mean the nature of the business is changing. I think producers are more artists now anyway. I’m not going to just find a band and make a record with them anymore. It’s just not that much fun. I would rather work with people that are my friends, have my input, be upfront and be able to write music. It is stuff I have always done. I don’t know what I will do next. I enjoy the playing, that’s fun.

[lauraramargosian]

LOVELOUD 2019: Positive Celebrity review! Oh, the emotions, performance, and survivors!

LOVELOUD 2019: Positive Celebrity review! Oh, the emotions, performance, and survivors!

LOVELOUD 2019 POSITIVE CELEBRITY RATING: 10/10 HIGHLY RECOMMEND EVEN IF YOU TRAVEL!

LOVELOUD 2019 not only attracted music lovers, but it was also an excellent way to help raise money for all charities benefiting LGBTQ communities.

In fact, each of the artists took time out of their to spread nothing less than a joy to every soul in the sold-out event.

Dan Reynolds took the stage to welcome all early arrivals to the festival he founded

“It’s not because our LGBTQ youth are broken,” Reynolds shared and pleaded that those who identify as LGBTQ youth “not take your life from us.”

Kesha: Rich, White, Straight Men belongs in a movie!

“We need you. We need every one of you. Your life is always worth living, always. There’s cool things that happen. Things get better.”

Truthfully, Utah has a lot of political control and while it might be difficult to digest, the Mormon church absolutely disagrees with those who have LGBTQ intentions. As far as to kick their own children out of their homes.

Leaving them homeless because they are “sinners,” and other man-made precepts that are not only harmful to one’s self-esteem but false.

“It has to do… with man-made precepts that are just false — that you can tell your neighbor how to live and who to love.”

Further, LOVELOUD was created to help, it’s an event to say “hey we got you.” And sometimes, blood will never be as supportive as your fellow LGBTQ friends and supportive talent.

Matt Easton also attended the event and never imagined he would be up on that stage inspiring other people after he bravely came out during his valedictorian speech at Brigham Young University.

In case you didn’t know, Brigham Young University is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Easton shared his coming out story and how many friends he had who thought of suicide as an option because they were told often “you are not normal.”

Of equal importance, this year LOVELOUD 2019 festival is celebrating their third year of success.

It has always been less about the lineup and more about the cause to help all those that identify as LGBTTQQIAAP (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, ally, pansexual).

Imagine Dragons singer Dan Reynolds opened up about the ultimate goal.

“The goal is to destigmatize, and in order to destigmatize something, we talk about it, we talk about it, we talk about it. We educate,” Reynolds told the Daily Herald in a red carpet interview before the festival. “I hope that it’s started to penetrate the culture a little bit.”

The singer was accompanied by a pianist, finished the festival with a sincere acoustic set including a few Imagine Dragons hits, an “I’ll Walk With You” duet with Tyler Glenn of Neon Trees and “Stand By Me.”

Kesha Sebert was the headliner for the event, joined by Elias Millan and her amazing dancers were on point.

Setting quite the energetic set singing songs including Tik Tok, Praying and Your Love is My Drug.

With that in mind, Kesha shared that LOVELOUD was important to her because of how she views the LGBTQ community and their well-being.

“It’s something I feel so strongly about,” further she stressed how important it is to love yourself for who you are and never listen to people who put you down in life.

In fact, Kesha even broke down during some of her general conversation with the crowd.

“I just want to encourage everybody here to not only love yourselves but love the person next to you and love the people around you,” Kesha told the audience. “You do not know what they’re going through. You do not know what they’ve been through.”

Kesha headlined the event, performing an energetic set featuring songs like “Tik Tok,” “Praying” and “Your Love is My Drug.” The singer said LOVELOUD was an important gig for her “because it’s something I feel so strongly about.”

Further, she even gave us the opportunity to strip while singing “Take It Off.” Our shirt landed right by her, picking it up she finished the song with it dangling off her guitarist’s gear!

One of her memorable performances was “Praying.”

Many know, Kesha stood up for what she felt was right after being violated in many ways. Most importantly, it seems this is Kesha’s anthem to that piece of crap (yea, we said it, Gotwald is a piece of crap).

The tears she sheds each time she sings that song (this is Positive Celebrity’s 2nd time seeing her perform LIVE) is emotional, you feel with her not for her and if you can relate it’s even more intense.

Throughout the start of LOVELOUD, many artists took the stage with their own stories including Glenn, AJR, Tegan and Sara, Daya, K.Flay, PVRIS, Laura Jane Grace, Paul Cardall, VINCINT, Parson James and former Brigham Young University Cosmo mascot Charlie Bird with former BYU Cougarettes.

Beyond those attending, other high profile celebrities chimed in including P!nk, Kristin Chenoweth, Ellen DeGeneres, Portia de Rossi, Brendon Urie of Panic! at the Disco, Jared Leto of 30 Seconds to Mars and some of Netflix’s “Queer Eye” cast also recorded short video messages that were shown at the festival between sets.

Kalen Allen told the Daily Herald how “amazingly excited he felt to host at LOVELOUD 2019.

“These are things, opportunities that I never would have thought I would have been able to have because of my sexuality, and so the fact that I am surpassing anything that I would have ever dreamed of, I just want to be an example to these kids that dreams do come true.”

He also shared how he felt the event has “opened some minds.”

“We’re coming at it with love, and so people feel OK to ask questions and explore it,” Glenn said. “I came out as gay in 2014 and personally left the LDS faith a few years ago, and I think from then to now, I’ve seen massive strides in taking down walls, and I think that’s what it’s about.”

With that in mind, we can’t forget the other organizations in town that have been doing their best for longer than LOVELOUD festival.

Yup, that’s my shirt hanging on their guitar. Haha. Excellent performance for “Take it Off!”

Positive Celebrity Exclusive: Colton Tran drops new short Cruella!

“Between Encircle and LOVELOUD and all the other organizations in town that have been at it much longer, the compassion has grown, and I think that the community has evolved,” Barbara Young said. “It’s really fun now because you’re seeing people who get it and you’re seeing hearts grow and now you get to just enjoy in all the love and acceptance that’s going on.”

In fact, they have achieved zero mortalities since it began.

“Encircle, since it’s started a couple of years ago, they’ve had no suicides of any of the kids that have come to Encircle, so super powerful,” Steve Young stated, body language spoke volumes as his eyes welled up with emotion.

Encircle in Utah is dedicated to leaving this world better than they left it with one goal.

“To Bring The Family And Community Together To Enable Our LGBTQ+ Youth To Thrive.”

The mission state itself is powerful.

“Encircle seeks to deepen and enrich the conversation among communities of faith and LGBTQ+ people. By teaching individuals to love themselves and empowering families, Encircle helps cultivate an environment where LGBTQ+ individuals can thrive. Our programs and services meet people wherever they are in their lives with cultural competency and sensitivity, using community partnerships, best practices, and innovative techniques.”

Most importantly, you can volunteer to make an even bigger impact, you never know who you are going to meet and become a big part of their life.

On their official website, you can check out services, friendship circles, programs, therapy, resources, our resources, their community calendar, locations including Provo, Salt Lake City, and Saint George.

Kesha gives a strong and emotional performance and speech!

If you don’t have enough time, do considering donating. The smallest amount can make a huge difference.

However, a simple Facebook share can go a VERY long way.

There are some great life-changing programs, one that stuck out for PCG is their Friendship Circles which provide opportunities for individuals to get together grouped by gender identity/sexual orientation and/or age to find a community of people going through the same things.

The talent on their line-up was beyond words.

K. Flay opened up with such energy even though it was so hot on that stage. She performed “Sister,” which was released prior to revealing her relationship with fellow performer Miya Folick.

It’s never easy to come out to family and friends as it is, can you imagine coming out to a complete world where the spotlight is always on you?

Imagine Dragons sang “Believer,” which is also the title of Reynolds documentary regarding the Mormon church and their attempts of treating LGBTQ youth. In fact, its the protest anthem, talent love singing this song with their emotion.

Truly, it has to be one of the best songs to sing at festivals. This one is all truth.

Tegan and Sara sang “BWU,” and it truly made us all stand up and dance, celebrating everyone who was there for who they were, not only did they sing amazing, their stage presence was on the spot, with light comedic teasing.

Daya sang “Insomnia”

The song dropped in the 2000s and talks about clubbing and forgetting your ex. The beat makes for a great crowd-pleaser.

Kesha sang “Rainbow”

The gorgeous lady just changed her hair from blonde to brunette. As a matter of fact, she looks fantastic and truly got the crowd singing, jumping and feeling that very emotion she felt on stage.

She even gave out bracelets that were triggered during her performance and the whole crowd lit up.

It only took one word for Kesha to describe everyone at LOVELOUD 2019.

“Beautiful.”

Rainbow was made for her LGBTQ fans and talks about life being hard but at the end of the trials in your life, there will surely be a rainbow.

PVRIS sang“No Mercy”

Headbanging was strong during PVRIS “No Mercy.” There wasn’t a mosh pit but there were people dancing in circles and having fun. It was literally PLUR for a hard-rock track.

Isn’t it amazing that the environment truly changes the effect of the song on those at LOVELOUD versus at a headline rock concert?

Positive Celebrity Exclusive: Daniel Radcliffe talks charity, his favorite role and more!

We stand corrected: if you’re going to headbang to one song at LOVELOUD, it’s “No Mercy.” This hard-rock track from the pop-rock outfit is guaranteed to get at least one moshpit going.

Laura Jane Grace & The Devouring Mothers sang“Apocalypse Now (& Later)”

What’s better than a fun upbeat song about having those blissful moments with the person you love, even if the world around you is crumbling to the ground.

LOVELOUD 2019 was one of the biggest shows since its birth and we are completely proud of those who showed up and stood up for what the believe, “just love.”

We interviewed Jaden Holly who opened up about his past with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

He shared his thoughts on compassion and the lack of it during the time of his life where he was active in the Mormon faith.

“I wouldn’t have been able to feel the compassion I’m feeling right now had I been active. During my time being active in the church, it was always “wrong,” and my parents didn’t help. Adding to the whole topic of gay marriage and other topics that truly don’t make sense. Even with the straight evidence supporting the church and its false doctrine, they continue to think it’s a “sin,” and people should be saved (maybe through therapy, you know pray the gay away).

LOVELOUD brought a lot to light and I’m thankful I can feel and love endlessly now without a fogged view of the world.

Love who you want to love, be with who you want to be with, stand proud and remember who you are because you are perfect.

Everyone here looks happy and I’m happy and it’s been fun.”

Honestly, Holly’s opinion was nothing less than the truth. It has been fun and sometimes we feel so judged and held back from the world.

It’s hard to know that there are still people who don’t live their life and experience the world because of judgment, recommendations, and other false misconceptions.

Unfortunately, Salt Lake City, Utah loves to attend church on Sundays and then harass those who were celebrating pride month.

Saddening, don’t you think? Oh, and let’s not forget hypocritical.

Most importantly, it doesn’t matter what “God,” you believe in or what you follow in life. You should always treat all people with love and respect.

Positive Celebrity Exclusive: Duo Transcend talks about AGT, charity and more!

What’s the use in hate, rejecting your children and basically f*cking some of us up to the point where heavy therapy and healing is needed?

The world can be a dark place but LOVELOUD 2019, it’s sponsors and those who have devoted their lives to helping those who have been affected…

That right there… is the reason we all fight for what’s right.

Did you attend the festival?

Positive Celebrity News handed a select few cards so be sure to stay tuned for the full photo album and Spectacles by Snapchat videos in HD!

Let us know what you thought and felt throughout the day in the comments below.

Dan Reynolds announces star-studded LOVELOUD Festival lineup

Made a new friend? Shout them out? Want to tell a celebrity something, post a comment, you never know who might be lurking.

Lastly, here’s a huge shoutout to the whole LOVELOUD team, you guys did amazing and we cannot wait to return next year.

Honestly, Kesha and others who are interested should always be considered as they make the show even more powerful.

LOVELOUD is meant to grow, inspire and create a community and so far, they’ve done nothing less than help people all over the world.

Inspiring, it’s exactly what the world needs, more love.

Great line-up, great time and great new friends!

Stay tuned, each day we will be updating each talents album! Feel free to let us know if you’d like to use any of these images for your own stories!

Blessed be

KESHA at LOVELOUD 2019

Celebrating 3-years since it’s inception! Go LOVELOUD!

Dan Reynolds opens up about LOVELOUD 2019!

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Positive Celebrity Gossip - Laurara Monique

Laurara Monique is known by various celebrities as the youngest and kindest celebrity blogger. PCG has been described as a "celebrity safe zone."

Positive Celebrity Gossip - Laurara Monique

My goodness, LOVELOUD 2019 was absolutely amazing. The environment was positive, fun and very inspiring. Thank you Loveloud Fest 2019 for all your hard work, the crew, the talent, everyone getting things together to celebrate who we are is people did a phenomenal job. I am proud of everyone who came and let their light shine! Albums are being updated daily! Enjoy what we had to share and stay tuned! Kesha K.Flay Daya AJR Tegan and Sara PVRIS Laura Jane Grace & the Devouring Mothers Dan Reynolds #KallenAllen #LOVELOUD2019 #kesha #DAYA #KFLAY

LOVELOUD 2019: Positive Celebrity review! Oh, the emotions, performance, and survivors!

LOVELOUD 2019: Positive Celebrity review! Oh, the emotions, performance, and survivors! Check it out right here on PCG magazine!

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